Foreigners get racism wrong again

As the French National Assembly votes on the burka, British progressive opinion tells us, not for the first time but totally without irony, that foreigners just can’t deal with racism as well as the Brits do.

The Guardian’s editorial (complete with typos and dodgy grammar) is clear about what the French are doing wrong:

From now on if you see [a] niqab in France, you are encouraged to believe by the state that it [is] because the wearer has something to hide. There could be a bomb lurking underneath. Is this message of fear going to advance the harmony and understanding already in short supply in a multifaith society where 5 million citizens are Muslim?

And Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting has no doubts about the French:

It sends a shiver down the spine … The hope has to be that this extraordinary decision never actually reaches the statute book … It is not difficult to see the racism which permeates this debate.

Adrian Hamilton in the Independent:

It may be because I'm too English for Gallic high rhetoric but it's very difficult to take seriously France's impassioned debate about banning the burka … The question of the full coverage of the face is a serious one but it is one for the Muslim communities themselves to argue out, not a bunch of overexcited Christian and secular legislators – including the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy – to make of it an issue of national rights and cultural absolutes.

Or, to put it another way:

It may be because I'm English but I wish the French just wouldn’t get so, well, so very French about things … The question of race and cultural relations in France is a serious one but it is one for the French communities themselves to argue out, not a bunch of overexcited British journalists …

I can’t continue my parody of Hamilton’s words because they are themselves a parody of English syntax, but his apparent rejection of ‘cultural absolutes’ is interesting in the context.

This is indeed a difficult question, with arguments on all sides. What we have here, however, is the difference between British and French attitudes to society, culture, religion and the state. And all that the Brits see is that the Frogs, not being British poor things, are by definition getting it wrong.