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"DANES
enjoy a worldwide reputation as a tolerant, humane and liberal people. Successive
Danish governments have shown courage in putting principles before profit,
by such acts as condemning human-rights abuses in China or offering support
to South Africa's Nelson Mandela during apartheid. Even this week, the government
offered to let Turkish children and elderly people made homeless by the
earthquake come to Denmark for three months. So the recent banning from
certain jobs of Muslim women who wear headscarves has provoked a fierce
row, and rudely shaken the Danish people" (The Economist, August
28, 1999).
"The affair began last November, when a 14-year-old schoolgirl's
application for one week's school-supervised work experience serving customers
at Magasin du Nord, Denmark's most prestigious department store, was rejected.
The reason? She wore a headscarf, in line with Muslim tradition" (The
Economist, August 28, 1999).
"The row was rekindled when Ebbe Lundgaard, chairman of the
FDB group, one of Denmark's biggest supermarket groups, and a former culture
minister, said last month that he too would not put women wearing headscarves
behind his cash registers, though he was happy to employ them elsewhere
in his shops. Banning headscarves at the checkouts, he argued, was no different
from the company's ban on men with waist-length hair or rings through their
noses: 'deviant' dress could scare away the customers. Another big supermarket
group, Dansk Supermarked, now says it too will not put women with headscarves
at the till" (The Economist, August 28, 1999).
"Embarrassed, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's Social-Democratic-led government
swiftly condemned this attitude. Banning headscarves, said Ove Hygum, the
labour minister, was a clear breach of anti-discrimination law. Though FDB
has since backed down, other stores insist they are within their rights.
'No form of headwear is allowed in our stores. The same rules apply to every
employee,' says Dansk Supermarked. A number of court cases claiming discrimination
are now being prepared" (The Economist, August 28, 1999).
"To the dismay of tolerant types, 56% of Danes told a recent
opinion poll that supermarket owners should be entitled to ban headscarves
- though fully 67% said that schoolgirls should have the right to wear them
in the classroom. 'Islam is pushing its way forward everywhere, at the cost
of Danes,' thundered Pia Kjaersgaard, leader of the far-right Danish People's
Party. 'Our entire cultural foundation is crumbling and the government is
Islam's willing stooge'" (The Economist, August 28, 1999).
"The oddity is that the Muslim population is not new to Denmark.
This little Scandinavian kingdom shed its homogeneity decades back. Denmark
began recruiting Turkish workers some 30 years ago; many Palestinian, Pakistani
and Bosnian Muslims also have settled there. Copenhagen's greengrocers,
tobacco kiosks and pizza parlours buzz with foreign tongues, owned and run
as they are by immigrants or their children. Indeed, it is the children
who have such difficulty fitting in, torn between one culture's traditions
and another's. Unemployment even among 'second-generation immigrants' was
11% the last time it was measured, in 1997, against the national average
that year of 7.9%" (The Economist, August 28, 1999).
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