Guardian article about French hijab issue

There is a piece in today’s Guardian, The reality of l’affaire du foulard (headscarf affair), about the inconsistent and hypocritical treatment of Muslims by the French state. She also mentions the speech Shirak gave when mayor of Paris about Muslims and blacks with an abundance of wives and children sponging off the state (and the smell!), which she correctly mentions would be political suicide for any local (never mind national) politician in the UK.

Secularism has never led to the cleansing of all religious expression from the public sphere – collective expressions of religious life are tolerated so long as they do not affect public order. Neither has it led to an absolute separation of church and state, nor even to a strictly neutral and egalitarian treatment of all religions by the state.

Several measures place the Catholic church in a privileged position in relation to other religions, particularly Islam. The maintenance of buildings of worship built before 1905 is the responsibility of local authorities, a practice that discriminates against Muslims, whose presence was barely felt at that time.