France’s Latest Headscarf Row and Marie Laguerre’s Viral Slap

by Hugh Fitzgerald

The BBC reported last Thursday that “French President Emmanuel Macron has warned against ‘stigmatising’ Muslims or linking the Islamic religion with the fight against terrorism. ‘We have to stand together with all our fellow citizens,’ Mr Macron said during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday. It came as a French woman said she was taking legal action against far-right politicians who criticised her for wearing an Islamic headscarf in public.”

All this calls to mind the slap of Marie Laguerre, as an instructive case of what happens to women who do not wear an Islamic headscarf in public. A CCTV video in July 2018 went most usefully viral. It shows a French girl, and a young Muslim male who had been following her on a Parisian street, making unwelcome remarks, and when she told him to “shut up” he came up to her and slapped her hard, before calmly walking away. According to the girl, 22-year-old engineering student Marie Laguerre, who posted the video on Facebook, along with more details about the incident, she had been minding her own business when she started to be followed by her unknown assailant, who made obscene and degrading comments and “noises with sexual connotations” to her while she was making her way home in the 19th district of Paris in July.

She said that when told him to “shut up,” he reacted first by throwing an ashtray, which narrowly missed her, and then he came towards her, wordlessly struck her with a hard slap, then walked away. There were plenty of eyewitnesses, and several men got up as if they meant to stop him,  but no one dared to actually attempt it.  Nowadays, we have all learned to be wary of maddened Muslims.

Fariz M. (French courts do not allow the last name of defendants to be given out) was eventually identified by the police, and brought to trial, where he was found guilty of “violence with the use or threat of a weapon” (that ashtray) but not of sexual harassment, after prosecutors said there were insufficient grounds for that charge. He was fined  €2,000 (£1,770) in damages and was sentenced to a further six months suspended sentence. He was also “ordered to undergo psychological care and take a course about gender-related violence.”

French people are said to be outraged by this judgement, which occurred just as the government is considering new legislation on sexual harassment, designed to allow for on-the-spot fines to be levied by the police, obviating the need for any arraignment, defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, trials — all of which mean long delays and unnecessary state expense. If this proposed law on sexual harassment is passed, the police will be able to take immediate action, interviewing the victim, talking to eyewitnesses, instantly reviewing CCTV tapes to corroborate a complaint and if the accused has been collared, levy a fine then and there.

Why is this case important? Because it offers one small but significant example, with which any girl or woman can identify, and that apparently touched many,  of a widespread phenomenon: the contempt for women, and especially for Infidel women, exhibited by so many Muslim males. This contempt has been expressed in various ways, most far worse than harassing talk, a thrown ashtray, and a slap. There were the 1,400 English girls who were treated as “easy meat” and passed around to be used sexually by the Muslim grooming gangs of Rotherham, in the U.K., a horrific business ignored for so long by the British authorities. There were  the mass sexual assaults by 2,000 Muslim men on 1,200 German girls and women on New Year’s Eve, 2015/2016 in Cologne and other cities. There have been the mass rapes of non-Muslim Yazidi girls in northern Iraq by members of the Islamic state. These things are terrible, but they are different only in degree, and not in kind, from the angry contempt for non-Muslim women shown in this recent video  from Paris.

There are two aspects of Islam that come together in this incident. The first is the sheer misogyny of Islam. Men are, according to the Qur’an and the testimony of Muhammad himself in the hadith, superior to women:

“Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” — Qur’an 4:34

The same Qur’anic verse explicitly sanctions the beating of disobedient wives, as a last resort if other means — first admonishing them, then sending them to separate beds — fail to obtain obedience. And as we know from the hadith, Muhammad once punched his favorite wife Aisha hard in the chest, behavior which then became permissible for others emulating the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct:

“Muhammad ‘struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?’” — Aisha (Sahih Muslim 2127)

The inferiority of women can be found in the fact that a woman’s testimony is worth only half that of a man (2:282), while a daughter inherits only half that of a son (4:11). In the hadith Muhammad explains the reason for a woman’s testimony being valued at half that of a man “because of the deficiency in her intelligence” (Bukhari 3.48.226).

The rules concerning marriage and divorce reinforce the notion of female inferiority. Polygyny — one husband, plural wives — is sanctioned in Islam, and reduces the value of women who are in the position of having to share a man. To obtain a divorce, a Muslim husband need only utter the tripe-talaq; he need not give a reason. A Muslim wife, however, must return the mahr, the sum given to the bride at her marriage, either by her groom or the groom’s father, to her husband, and must provide a good reason for wanting a divorce, for unlike what is permitted the husband who wants a divorce, it is not automatically granted to a wife.

Muslim women have a duty to cover themselves — depending on where they live, the kind of cover will differ. It might be merely a hijab in Turkey or Tajikistan, or a niqab in Saudi Arabia, a niqab, or a chador in Iran, This is necessary because without the cover women are too sexually alluring to men, who cannot be expected to contain their animal lust. If anything untoward should occur, it’s the uncovered woman’s fault.

But if women are inferior in Islam, and dangerously alluring unless covered, Infidel women are even more definitely to be despised. For the Qur’an describes all Infidels as “the most vile of creatures” (98:6), while Muslims are, by contrast, “the best of peoples” (3:110). An Infidel girl, doubly inferior as a female and as a non-Muslim, who walks shamelessly around without any cover, like Marie Laguerre, is simply asking for it, and Farid M. was there to give it to her. How dare she tell him to “shut up”? He knows he did nothing wrong, even if the French Infidels, applying their ludicrous laws, think otherwise and impose a fine.

Because of the  appearance of this video on YouTube, where it went viral, a stronger law making sure that sexual harassment is treated as a crime is now likely to pass. But making it a crime won’t stop it. The problem is large, and growing, on the streets, in the cafes, on buses and subways, with Muslim boys and men harassing non-Muslim girls and women in microaggressions that, unlike here, are seldom caught on tape. They are females, and therefore inferior. They are Infidels, and therefore they are vile and deserve our Muslim contempt. They walk around, without a hijab, wearing lipstick and makeup, in short skirts or pants — for Muslim men, these are come-hither signals, and these women cannot hypocritically pretend they were not asking for it. What else could their dress and attitude possibly mean?

If the new law on sexual harassment is put into effect, it should give some relief to the girls and women who have had to endure this eruption of sexual assault — a verbal one, full of insults and innuendo — that menacingly  suggests an actual physical one might follow. It should cut down on the intolerable behavior of Muslim males toward French girls and women, for it is they who are responsible for this epidemic of sexual harassment in France.

Marie Laguerre was disappointed with the court’s verdict:

Speaking to the French publication Libération before the hearing, the 22-year-old victim described the development [that the state decided not to bring a charge of sexual harassment] as a “harsh blow” symbolically and a “disappointment.”

“My attacker will not be able to understand the misogynistic and sexist nature of what he is accused of,” she said (in French).

“We are missing out on teaching him a lesson to make him aware that it’s no longer possible to treat women like pieces of meat.”…

From her comments, it is unclear whether Marie Laguerre recognizes, even if she does not state explicitly, that the “misogynistic and sexist nature” of her attacker’s behavior arises naturally out of the texts and teachings of Islam. If she does, one can sympathize with her unwillingness to state this directly, given the real threat of harm from those who won’t tolerate such public criticism of their “peaceful, tolerant” faith.

Of the millions of Muslim males in France, how many think it is wrong to approach Infidel females, to follow them along the street, to make remarks to them about sex, in short, to sexually harass them? After  all, these women are both inferior to men, and contemptible (“most vile creatures”), as Infidels. And how many Muslim males, having been told by the French authorities that females are the complete equals of men, and that non-Muslims are fully the equals of Muslims, who deserve to be treated with the same respect, will manage to do so? Which are Muslims in France more likely to follow — what the French Infidels tell them, or what they are taught in the Qur’an and hadith?

First published in Jihad Watch.