yet another example of short term political opportunism from rita verdonk. there are national elections on wednesday in the netherlands and she probably felt the need to say something controversial since her party is about to lose almost a third of their seats. the subjects islam and integration hadn't even had all that much attention during this election campaign (for the first time since 9/11 i suppose), but with her statement this weekend she's brought it straight back to the newspaper headlines just days before the election... and we all know she's going for the anti-immigration votes.
i doubt she'll be able to introduce this law. it was first proposed by far-right geert wilders MP (who indeed doesn't have much rationale, savage clone) but last month the reports went that this law "wasn't legally possible"... and now in the last weekend for the elections suddenly it is? even in her own party there have been doubts spoken out about this. i'd be pretty surprised if this doesn't go against any fundamental european laws regarding freedom of religion.
surely the "security" and "integration" excuses don't strike as very strong arguments, especially since de facto the proposed law isn't going to have much of an impact. there have been several estimations about how many women actually wear a burqa in holland: out of a muslim population of 1 million (total population of the country is 16 million) the amounts estimated were between 30 and 50!
so that's not really going to help integration much now, is it?
to make a law for a few dozens of people can only be seen as either a complete overreaction or a cheap populist move to me... and i suspect it's the latter. i doubt that women who are wearing a burqa now are going to stop doing so in case of a ban. they might just no longer go outside at all.
as for security, whenever identification is really required then police already have the means to ask for any face coverings to be removed. a ban for wearing burqas in public wouldn't add anything to that. (apparently the law is going to count also for full-face helmets and tokolosh' balaclava)
what worries me though is the signal this propsed law gives off. i think some muslims will feel victimised and alienated, even if they don't agree with wearing burqas themselves. on top of that the topic can be easily hijacked by radical islamists, driving more angry young muslim men into their way... actually in the current climate it wouldn't surprise me if we could see a reaction from the islamic world that is similar to what happened after that danish newspaper published those mohammed cartoons last year.
edit:
that post wasn't intended to be so long... i know hardly anyone reads long posts anyway.