From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Mon 18 Oct 2004 - 19:33:20 GMT
_ After his call to ban all religious inspired kerchiefs from public places
and houses, P. Dewael, Minister of Home Affairs, again tackles some
Islamitic customs. Without mentioning Islam as such, he says " that all
people are equal, but not all cultures. "
As the liberal he is, he is not keen on the fact that women are due to
cover all of their body with for example the burka.
He can 't bear the fact that women are kept indoors and aren 't allowed
to follow language- and other courses in order to finally fit in. And he don 't
accepts a religion that don 't recognises that there must be a seperation of
Church and State. He claims to belief in diversity, but retains the notion
that ' foreigners ' should know where their bounderies are.
" That is something we should be clear about, and it is far more important
than just knowing our language ."
Dewael says, that the question should be raised again of how tolerant our
society should be for lines of conduct of other cultures. Some of those
practices, boil down the overall level of Western society.
" That [ they] acknowledge no seperation between Church and State is
really inconsistent with their stay in our mids. That they still work with
forced marriages and with depriciations of liberty, can 't no longer be
tolerated."
Some comments,
" It hurts that still people see adepts of the Islam as fundamentalists !
I am too against the oppression of women and I know there is still a lot
to be done to reverse such a view, but that ain 't much to do with Islam.
We have to search for the deep rooted misconceptions of such things,
of one is in fact that people were total ignorant dropped into a far indus-
trialised society ! " says Cemal Caudarli.
Sami Emmni argues that " all cultures are indeed equal, but are on the
other hand " different '.
For Nahima Lanjri, involves the fact that our society isn 't that keen on
open up its doors for immigrants and specially Islamitic ones, more than
a bias of truth. Immigrants don 't have and aren't giving eqaul chances.
<< For me, however, all of this will not meet the point.
The ' truth ' idiom is inwritten down into our Western/ Flemish history,
we are the third most racistic region in Europe, which is a fact of
political instigation of which active and passive subjects are recog-
nisable as our own far more than those things which only can be
appreciated and / or accepted ( tolerated), like the colour of the skin,
language, religious practices, dialects, surnames, etc...
What we in a certain way apply to, to get our society going can be
pointed as universal_ of which the subjects aren 't direct recognisable
as socialists, democrats, ecologists, etc but of which the values we
hold can and could be of a greater value for all of us.
We can only hope that one day all people will meet those values, like
liberty, equality,etc_ we hope that once the Islamitic world will hold
itself against those, although they have to and must understand that
not all people can and will be ( want to be) someday a proven Muslim.
But neither must we _ seen from our own democratic point of view_
disregard the fact that societies can and will be different.
Regards,
Kenneth
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