Mistakes we cannot repeat.
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Just lately most of us have read and heard that education authorities in the UK are considering banning muslim schoolgirls from wearing the hiqab to school. Reasons given are “safety, security and health”. And, judging by the publics reaction, this is a move in the right direction…but I wonder.
Whose safety, whose security, and whose health is threatened by a young girl having her face covered?.
They are proposing banning an individual from dressing a certain way. According to their religion. According to their culture. And a large section of the British, and it seems Australian public, agree with this.
I think it is appalling. Even dangerous. Because this sort of thing has happened before.
On a recent visit to Amsterdam I purchased the books, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and ‘Anne Frank. Beyond the Diary’. Amsterdam is where Anne lived with her family after fleeing Nazi Germany, and of course, went into hiding with them for two years.
Reading this little girls diary, as an adult, was a far more harrowing experience than it was when I first read it as a 12 year old girl. Why? because as a 12 year old, as a child, the future that held such horrors for Anne and her family never entered my mind. As an adult, I knew only too well what happened after the phrase… ‘Anne’s diary ends here’.
Anne and her family, like hundreds of thousands of her fellow Dutch and Germans, were Jews. Not a specific ‘race’ but a ‘faith’. And for this they were persecuted. In her time Jewish men were not allowed to grow their beards; Jewish children could not go to school with other children; Jewish people were singled out and banned from doing what identified them as being Jewish.
Why? because the Jews were deemed to be the cause of Germany’s post-war problems, even the Dutch accused them of the same thing.
It seems to me that the UK, and scarily Australia, are heading the same way with their attitude towards muslims. Followers of Islam. Ban them from dressing a certain way? whilst we dress as we wish? Blame them for acts of terrorism that they had nothing to do with?. All these girls are doing is dressing in an overtly modest way…in contrast to most young females in our society who wear next to nothing at school and in the street. Disturbingly we openly accept the latter but question with suspician the former. Why?.
Australian and British societies are supposed to be democratic, we supposedly recognise freedom of dress; freedom of expression, and freedom of worship. We must continue this tolerance and extend it to all who arrive on our shores.
If we do not, if we start to demand…’Do it our way or else’…we run the risk of breeding the same prejudice and intolerance that caused so much misery, and ultimate tragedy, for Anne Frank and her family just over 65 years ago. Not too mention the millions of other ordinary people just like her. Followers of a certain religion, who looked and dressed the ‘wrong way’.
Breeding this prejudice and intolerance is bad enough…to legislate it, to me, would be unthinkable.
Do we wish to repeat mistakes of the past?.
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