Austrians Deliver Bad News to Shariah Islamists Living in Their Country
The ruling coalition of Austria announced its plans to introduce a bill that would ban the hijab or any other head covering for young girls, the BBC reported on Wednesday.
The proposed law would ban headscarves for any young woman under the age of 10.
Austrian politicians referred to the proposed act, to be introduced this summer, as a “child protection act” which would also represent a “symbolic act” and allow younger children from Muslim nations to integrate into Austrian society.
Full-face coverings were banned from schools and other public buildings as of 2017.
The two main movers behind the proposed ban would be the center-right Austrian People’s Party and the controversial right-wing Freedom Party, which has taken a staunch stance against immigration into the European nation.
“Our goal is to confront any development of parallel societies in Austria,” Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the People’s Party told radio broadcaster ORF.
Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the Freedom Party said in a Facebook post that the goal of the legislation was to protect young girls from “political Islam.”
He added that “(c)ampaign promises have been fulfilled” by the proposed legislation.
However, the ban remains unpopular with the Muslim community in Austria and could theoretically be vetoed by the country’s center-left president, although such vetoes are extremely rare and likely unconstitutional.
“This initiative is not truly about taking care of children and being concerned about their well-being. It is more or less another symbolic action taken by policy to signal a broader public, to say, we are in control when it comes to the Islam issue,” Carla Amina Baghajati, a spokeswoman for Austria’s Islamic Religious Community, told reporters.
According to ABC News, she said that the practice of forcing headscarves on girls under 10 is already frowned upon by Muslim families in Austria, and there is “a very effective inter-Muslim dialogue” with families who do force girls to wear the religious head-wear.
There’s also the fact that Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen has previously called on all women regardless of their religious affiliation to consider wearing the headscarf to combat what he said was prejudice against Muslims.
Technically speaking, Austrian federal presidents do not have the constitutional power to refuse to sign a bill that has passed both houses of the country’s legislature; the law’s constitutionality is decided by the federal courts.
Only one president under the current constitution has refused to sign a bill: In 2008, Heinz Fischer declined to sign an amendment to a trade law because he felt that the legislation’s retroactive criminalization of certain acts violated the constitution’s expressed prohibition against such acts.
There are already bans on the full veil in several EU nations, and France has enacted a similar ban on the headscarf in state-run schools, although it does not cover universities.
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