At the end of January, deputies in the French upper house voted to amend a law that will prohibit the wearing of "conspicuous religious symbols" at sporting events and competitions. This new law joins a law passed in April last year that bans the wearing of a burqa or niqab in public places.
This includes streets, public transport, shopping shops, hospitals and cinemas. The hijab, also known as the "headscarf", was already banned in French schools in 2004. These laws, and especially the one from 2021, have also been used by other Western European countries to enforce restrictions on wearing a veil in public.
The ban on religious symbols at sporting events and competitions is justified on the grounds that the headscarf would pose a danger to female athletes. But this is a lie, because for years women wore a veil during sports without anyone caring.
France, which likes to present itself as a "country of freedom", has been pursuing an anti-Muslim agenda for a long time. Not least, mosques or Muslim organisations that were not under the tutelage of the bourgeois French state were closed down - including organisations that campaigned against discrimination against Muslims. In the process, Muslim women in particular, with the various headscarf/veiling bans, repeatedly become targets of imperialist chauvinism in France, which claims that Islam is in crisis and that in its radical form it poses a threat to the values of the republic. It clearly shows that these values are based on a French identity that is above all else, and that anyone who does not fit in is simply banned from the public sphere. The fact that this attack is now also directed against women who simply want to do sport shows that the French state also goes to the most personal areas of those it does not want.
But many women, especially young ones, are not putting up with this and have started protest actions and petitions.
