Image: Touche Pas à Ma Constitution
If Rachid Nekkaz becomes the next president of France, remember that you read about him here first.
Of course, you may have heard of him already in which case you should disregard that opening sentence.
Rachid put his name forward as a candidate for the Parti Socialiste on the same day Sarko's ailing UMP party held its contentious debate on secularism, more generally interpreted as a debate, and quite possibly an ill-considered one, on Islam.
But he is also a campaigner for the Muslim women who, under the new law that came into force last month, now face fines for wearing face-covering burqas in public.
Rachid is a interesting character, a well-to-do businessman with property and other interests, born in France to Algerian parents and married to an American Roman Catholic. In reality, he does not even care for head-to-toe female attire. But he cares even less for a law he sees as an affront to France's claim to be the birthplace of liberty and the freedom of expression.
Accordingly, through his lobby group Touche Pas à Ma Constitution (Hands off my constitution), he launched a €1m fund to pay the fines of any woman stopped and penalised under the newly introduced ban. The standard fine is €150 though the stakes are a lot higher if coercion is involved: €30,000 and up to a year in jail, double if a minor is forced to cover her face.
Rachid is sorely in need of a martyr. He wants to pursue such a case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. Trouble is, for now, that has not been able to find one; the French government tells me "27 or 28" women have been fined already; Rachid disbelieves this, says there is no credible evidence of a single case leading to a fine.
When I spoke to the interior ministry, someone made the point that just because a woman did not ask for reimbursement from the Nekkaz fund, this did not mean she did not exist. Rachid himself says his campaign is so well-connected that if a fine had genuinely occurred, he would know about it.
As you can imagine, I have written rather a lot on the subject for The National, Abu Dhabi, a city in which it is quite commonplace to see women in the full niqab, some of them very stylish, in the shopping malls and hotels.
And last week, I wrote about it for The Guardian's Comment is Free online pages, my first contribution to them for more than three years.
It brought a sharp reminder that when you stray into such a forum, you set yourself up as an Aunt Sally. There are lots of people out there just waiting to have a pop.
On this occasion I got away lightly, essentially a few complaints that the subject was of no interest and should not be aired at all. I found myself wondering why anyone would go to the trouble of ploughing through the original article and scores of comments and then post, at some length, on how déjà vu it all is.
Despite the affected aloofness, the piece attracted no fewer than 186 comments before the discussion was closed. Three or four were from me, answering criticism or adding detail, but it still represented a healthy enough response of the sort I hazily recall from Telegraph blogging days.
I hope to be back at Comment is Free before long. But somehow I do not think it will be to write about Rachid Nekkaz carrying PS hopes into the 2012 contest. The official left challenger to Sarko and Marine Le Pen is rather more likely to be DSK - the International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn - even if he has to overcome the minor embarrassment of having been photographed climbing into a sleek and decidedly gauche caviar Porsche.
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