Belgium – La Libre Publishes Opinion Piece on Secularism with Anti-Muslim Dog-Whistling
This article is part of the Media Monitoring Highlights of June, a monthly overview of the most significant results of our monitoring of traditional and new media in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, and the United Kingdom.
Date of publication: 11 June 2020
Media outlet: La Libre, mainstream French-language news outlet
Author: Nadia Geerts, teacher and writer
Headline: “Yes to neutrality in higher education”
Link: https://bit.ly/3exNGlH
Description of the anti-Muslim content: This article is an opinion piece in support of the decision by the Constitutional Court of Belgium which, on the 4th of June, ruled that the ban of religious symbols in higher education was not contrary to the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The decision was a response to a complaint initiated by a group of Muslim women who were studying at the Francisco Ferrer Brussels university college, where wearing religious symbols is not allowed. The author, secularism militant Nadia Geerts, stresses the importance of teaching “neutrality” to students, especially those that will be working as teachers in the future. She writes that the decision by the Constitutional Court is an “excellent signal” as it “embraces the cause of a ‘republican’ interpretation of equality, associated with equal treatment”, instead of a “conception of equality, which requires the recognition of differentiated rights and eventually undermines equality of all before the law.” Although the ban concerns all religious symbols, La Libre chose an image depicting Muslim women, despite not mentioning them at all in the article. And yet, the article is rife with anti-Muslim dog whistling. Terms such as “community pressures” and “most radicalised students” are expressions often used within anti-Muslim narratives. There are also a number of implicit disparaging references to Muslim women specifically, including inferred attacks to those who refuse to remove their headscarf: “The student who refuses - or does not see the need - to remove their convictional symbols [...] would send a very clear and not very reassuring signal concerning their disposition to ‘refrain from testifying in favour of a religious system”.
Myth debunked: Although the decision by the Constitutional Court – reported as a quote in the article - admits that the ruling might disproportionately affect certain minorities, Nadia Geerts fails to recognise this. In fact, her delight about the Court ruling, and her implicit disparaging attacks against Muslim women and Muslim communities, suggest that she is aware of it and approves of it. Contrary to what the author claims, radical forms of secularism, such as the one in place in Belgium, do not ensure the equal treatment of all before the law. They are exclusionary policies that unequally affect some categories of the population more than others, amplifying the existing barriers and forms of discrimination that Muslim women already face in society. The Constitutional Court ruling prompted a widespread response on social media, where many students and young people, especially Muslim women, expressed their concerns using hashtags such as #TouchePasAMesEtudes (Don’t touch my studies) and #HijabisFightBack. A dozen of higher education institutions stood up against the ruling, declaring that wearing the headscarf and other religious symbols is allowed in their schools.
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