Robert Spencer makes a very good point about the French ban on the Islamic head scarf (the hijab): Islamic France and human rights.

France seems to be placing all the hope it once placed in the Maginot Line in a strange and seriously flawed idea: that it can contain the forces of Islamic theocracy by outlawing the most innocuous manifestation of Islamic anti-secularism, the headscarf.

Protests have erupted all over France, and they have turned ugly. The day after 20,000 Muslims protested the ban, a Jewish school bus was burned and stones were thrown at the synagogue in Strasbourg. Police believe these incidents were connected to the demonstrations.

The French are targeting the headscarf because they understand it is a symbol of something profoundly anti-French, although they don’t seem to grasp exactly what. Consequently their coercive secularism is targeting the symptom rather than the cause.

If only French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy had the courage to say, “All right, you can have your headscarf. But to be a citizen of France you must explicitly and definitively renounce for all time the elements of Islamic law – the Sharia – that are at variance with the idea of the equality of rights and dignity of all people.”