France appears to have passed another bill restricting free speech. In addition to an earlier ban on suggesting that the holocaust might not have happened, a bill has now been passed to disallow denial of the Turks’ genocide against the Armenians in 1915. While, clearly, it is one thing to act out wishes to kill Armenians, to ban denial of an historic event is a dangerous precident. It isn’t clear to me that such a law has a benefit. Even if it does, however, it is a law not dissimilar to a Christian country banning denial that Christ was crucified by Jews. Against such a law there would be huge outcry. Here, I fear, we shall only hear major outcry from Turkey itself, and then only really because it is an insult to their history, rather than really being an infringement of the right to free speech.
Miss Aishah Azmi
Sunday, October 15th, 2006Today BBC News 24 has been full of pictures of the aforenamed Muslim lady who is the centre of a controversy over her apparent refusal to remove her veil for teaching purposes. The reasons for her involvement in the current discussions over the veil, and how her story relates to Jack Straw’s recent comments about veils, are unclear. She has, however, made her own situation perfectly clear in an interview performed by Peter Sissons. Towards the end of the interview she started to stumble over questions and even asked if she had to answer all questions – could it possibly be that she was being prompted? I would never like to assume. Miss Azmi has said that she is willing to remove the veil for teaching, but only with no men in the room. She also did not wear the veil for her interview. Sissons repeatedly asked if there was a male in the room during the interview, a question that Miss Azmi initially and suspiciously avoided answering. It turns out that, indeed, there was a man in the room. Why did she not mention at the time that she had to keep her veil on with men in the room? Having a man interviewing her, surely she would have felt that she had to put the veil on and therefore would have informed the interviewers of her preference for wearing one? Apparently this is not the case.
All in all it appears that while sacking her for wearing a veil may be unreasonable and open to discussion over whether she is capable of performing her duties whilst wearing one, it is quite clear that in not wearing a veil for the interview and subsequently insisting on wearing one later she has been dishonest in her interview and hence should be sacked for that reason and that reason alone.
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