Leerlingen van de provinciale scholen in Oost-Vlaanderen mogen geen hoofddoek meer dragen op school. De Oost-Vlaamse provincieraad heeft het hoofddoekenverbod vanmiddag goedgekeurd, weliswaar met wisselmeerderheid met Vlaams Belang. Maar niet alle scholen zien dat zitten. "We vrezen dat meisjes met een hoofddoek nu voor thuisonderwijs gaan kiezen", klinkt het.
Except I’m not. Belgium isn’t banning American flags here, nor tackling their own systemic problems of white supremacy and support for imperialism with a rule like this. They are reinforcing the position of white chauvinist moral authority over non-white people. It is precisely part of the colonial and imperial dynamic that says “this group over here is savages and is incapable of self-determining as a people how to behave.”
As for your attempt to distinguish culture and ideology, they are often intertwined and it’s not so simple in practice that you can just target the one without targeting the other. I’m quite sure you haven’t talked to the Muslims in that area and found out the reasons they wear a head scarf. As far as I can tell, your line of reasoning goes something like: “Religion always bad -> This is 100% a symbol of participation in organized religion and can’t mean anything else, or beyond that -> Therefore, banning it cannot be anything but good.” This is nonsense though. I am not personally a fan of organized religion, but when I came to understand views about imperialism and communism and so on, it became important for me to look at it with a broader lens. Take the Palestinian cause, for example. It would be tantamount to siding with zionists to focus on Hamas not being secular while they are sacrificing their lives trying to survive a genocide and to side with colonizer talking points against Hamas because of any religiosity they have. Palestinians who are directly involved in the struggle can contend with that, but as an outsiders, it is foolish for us to try to judge from an ivory tower.
This kind of ivory tower judging is how people arrive at “ultra-left” stances that are inadvertently aligned with the western empire, instead of in opposition to it. You don’t have to like Islam to understand that Belgium is a part of the white supremacist, imperialist order and that when they target Muslims in a way like this, it has nothing to do with liberating people from an oppressive ideology and everything to do with treating them as lesser and exercising control over them as a people. They aren’t saving women, they are subverting self-determination.
Except I’m not. Belgium isn’t banning American flags here, nor tackling their own systemic problems of white supremacy and support for imperialism with a rule like this. They are reinforcing the position of white chauvinist moral authority over non-white people. It is precisely part of the colonial and imperial dynamic that says “this group over here is savages and is incapable of self-determining as a people how to behave.”
As for your attempt to distinguish culture and ideology, they are often intertwined and it’s not so simple in practice that you can just target the one without targeting the other. I’m quite sure you haven’t talked to the Muslims in that area and found out the reasons they wear a head scarf. As far as I can tell, your line of reasoning goes something like: “Religion always bad -> This is 100% a symbol of participation in organized religion and can’t mean anything else, or beyond that -> Therefore, banning it cannot be anything but good.” This is nonsense though. I am not personally a fan of organized religion, but when I came to understand views about imperialism and communism and so on, it became important for me to look at it with a broader lens. Take the Palestinian cause, for example. It would be tantamount to siding with zionists to focus on Hamas not being secular while they are sacrificing their lives trying to survive a genocide and to side with colonizer talking points against Hamas because of any religiosity they have. Palestinians who are directly involved in the struggle can contend with that, but as an outsiders, it is foolish for us to try to judge from an ivory tower.
This kind of ivory tower judging is how people arrive at “ultra-left” stances that are inadvertently aligned with the western empire, instead of in opposition to it. You don’t have to like Islam to understand that Belgium is a part of the white supremacist, imperialist order and that when they target Muslims in a way like this, it has nothing to do with liberating people from an oppressive ideology and everything to do with treating them as lesser and exercising control over them as a people. They aren’t saving women, they are subverting self-determination.