Sydney, May 25: Lawmakers in Australia’s most populous state voted against banning the burka, with one accusing the Christian MP who moved the bill of stigmatizing Muslims, as city authorities in Brussels banned a protest against a ban against wearing the full-face Islamic veil in public.
Fred Nile, of the right-wing Christian Democrats Party, urged the New South Wales parliament to vote in favor of banning the full Islamic veil for security reasons and to “set women free from domination of males.”
But his bill was quashed in the state’s upper house by 26 to three votes, with the center-left Labor and more radical Greens parties condemning it as racist.
“Stigmatizing entire community”
“There is no urgency in spreading further fear and hatred in our community,” said Islamic Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane.
Nile’s real intent was “stigmatizing an entire community,” added Greens MP John Kaye.
It follows heated public debate sparked earlier this month by calls from conservative national Senator Cory Bernardi for a ban on the burka, which he claimed was “emerging as the preferred disguise of bandits and ne’er-do-wells.”
Bernardi’s comments, prompted by the use of the Islamic veil in an armed robbery in Sydney, led both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his opposition counterpart Tony Abbott to declare that such a ban was not current policy.
Muslims make up about 1.7 percent of Australia’s heavily Christian population of 22 million, and religious tensions have run high in recent years.
Anti-Muslim sentiment flared on Sydney’s southern Cronulla Beach in December 2005 when mobs of whites attacked Lebanese Australians there in a bid to “reclaim the beach.”
The race riots, the country’s worst of modern times, sparked a retaliatory campaign in which churches, shops and cars were attacked.
The French cabinet on Wednesday approved a draft law to ban the Muslim full-face veil from public spaces, paving the way for a parliamentary vote in July.
Protest banned
City authorities in Brussels meanwhile banned a planned protest against a looming ban against wearing the burka in public, speaking of “public order problems.”
An organization called Sharia4Belgium, whose website includes videos by Islamists including Britain’s Anjem Choudary, called last week for a protest this coming Saturday in the Belgian capital after the national parliament backed moves to ban the burka.
In Brussels, police and the organ evaluating public threat drew up a “totally negative report” as the planned protest represented a “too big risk of public order troubles,” said Nicolas Dassonville, spokesman for the Brussels mayor’s office.
Therefore mayor Freddy Thielemans had decided to ban the protest, he said.
The application to hold a protest has been signed by a “guerrilla pseudonym” and the people backing the call “are well known for their very bellicose past,” said Dassonville.
On top of that the protest would have taken place at the same time as the traditional “Zinneke Parade”, a sort of carnival parade expected to attract tens of thousands to the center of Brussels.
Last month Belgian deputies backed a draft law banning the wearing of the Muslim veil in all public places, including on the streets, creating a controversial first for Europe.
The text must still be adopted by the upper house Senate before it can come into effect.
-Agencies