Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced that her government plans to introduce legislation to limit the number of foreign students in classrooms as well as ban full-face coverings.
“A measure will soon be presented to a Cabinet meeting to legally establish a maximum number of foreign students per class. It also requires parents of foreign students facing serious difficulties integrating into the school system to learn Italian and bans burqas and niqabs in schools,” she said during an event with Brothers of Italy, as per NBC News.
Learning the Italian language is also to be required. “If there is only one child in a class who doesn’t understand Italian, that child will likely be able to learn the language and integrate quickly with the help of classmates and teachers,” she explained. “However, if the number of children who don’t understand the language becomes large—or even the majority—that is no longer integration; it is neglect.”
“You must go to school with your face uncovered, and in Italy no one, in the name of a real or supposed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide herself,” Meloni added.
Similarly, Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker declared that his administration intends to introduce a law to ban political Islam in an effort to protect Western values.
“I am saying quite clearly: I do not want our children and grandchildren to grow up in an Islamic state. Everyone in Austria can believe what they want and in what they want,” he wrote on social media. “This freedom of belief is protected by our constitution. But where believers and non-believers are distinguished, where men and women are not equal, where our institutions, authorities, and courts are not respected, this freedom ends. Just as we protect the practice of religion, we must also protect our democracy.”
Similarly, Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) State Secretary Jörg Leichtfried said, according to a translation, that a nation must defend itself “when a religion is misused to attack this state governed by the rule of law and this democracy.”
