A "few thousand women" in the whole of France are thought to wear the full veil, but this has not stopped Nicolas Sarkozy or Clark from risking the physical assault of the tiny minority who do. No advocacy of "cultural relativism" is intended here; universal human rights and secularism should be encouraged. While it is quite possible women are being coerced into wearing the burqa, no evidence has emerged to confirm this proposition, purely philosophical discourse is taking precedence.
Clark though is being disingenuous, he does not support human rights or secularism. The former is a particularly "middle class" preoccupation, as though the Metropolitan Police's fatal assault of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson or the shooting of electrician Jean Charles de Menezes can be written off as "bourgeois" concerns. His attitude to Slobodan Milošević, his "prisoner of conscience", receives plenty of critical attention elsewhere, well deserved, and easy to find on the web.
Clark might argue he is merely defending the form secularism takes in the Fifth Republic, rather than putting forward his own considered opinion. This would be quite honest by Clark's standards. When it suits him, he is far from being a secularist, making a case for the complete opposite in a different context. This bizarre creed might be called "formal theocratic socialism":
The biggest mistake of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe was not building an alliance with the Church. I know there were valid historical reasons for socialist antipathy to organised religion- but if an arrangement could have been reached, a much more widespread popular support for socialism could have been achieved.This is fantasy, clumsily written. Evidently a separation of church and state can be jettisoned if one is sympathetic to the regime. The problem with the old Soviet bloc for Clark were not its repression or its shaky economies, but its inability to maintain more control over the people.
Elections for Clark are a means whereby populations affirm the validity of his flexible preferences, as his comments on Ahmadinejad's disputed victory suggest, not for governments to be freely chosen. Supporting Sarkozy on the grounds of women's rights looks opportunist; normally Clark has nothing to say about feminism and admits to sharing the social conservatism of Peter Hitchens. His politics in this area place him well to the right of Oliver Kamm, his nemesis. The treatmant of women for Clark is irrelevant if the regime is fanatically anti-American.
His opposition to immigration, not explicitly stated here, is another issue where he is to the right of Kamm, who shares the attitude of leftists like Nigel Harris in favouring the abolition of immigration controls. To return to Neil Clark:
The fact is that the left - not just in France, but in Europe generally - is in a dilemma over the issues raised by large-scale Islamic immigration to the continent.Quite so, but another dilemma is why anyone should take Neil Clark seriously. It is undeniable the terrorists responsible for flying two airliners into the World Trade Centre, or the London bombers in 2005, were Muslims with European connections. Clark, however, is flexible over Muslim regimes with terrorist links. He regrets the freeze on relations with the hereditary Assad regime in Syria, thought to be responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 and more recent atrocities. So what exactly does Clark find tricky about Muslims living in Europe?
He expressed his pro-Syrian outlook in the noted left-wing periodical The American Conservative last year. Not officially online, Clark has reproduced the piece in two parts here and here.
