“This is a society that has doubts about itself,” Tariq Ramadan told a French parliamentary panel mulling a burqa ban. “For me, this commission is born of a real self-doubt, and suddenly they’re looking at one element, at the most extreme slice. The problem won’t be solved like that.” Ramadan claims that the larger problem in France is discrimination which means that with an Arab-sounding name one won’t get a job or an apartment, pointing to findings by the Paris-based anti-racism group SOS-Racism, which indicated recently that some French recruitment companies are applying racist policies and ethnic profiling in hiring, filtering out non-white candidates. Ramadan positioned himself against a ban.
