A ban on headscarves

A specially appointed commission has recommended to the French government that religious symbols should be banned from schools. I expressed my doubts about this recommendation a few weeks ago (November 14), and those doubts are only strengthened by aspects of the two reports here. They say, in turn:

It is not currently illegal to wear religious symbols in French state schools...
.....
[B]acking a law on the wearing of headscarves is a big majority of MPs from right and left, and more than half the French population.
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Leaders of the French Catholic and Jewish communities have expressed opposition to legislation.

And:

The panel recommended a ban from classrooms of all "obvious" political and religious symbols. More discreet symbols, such as small crosses, would be acceptable, it said.
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There also has been an alarming rise in anti-Semitic attacks, and teaching about the Holocaust "becomes impossible" in some classrooms.

If it hasn't hitherto been illegal to wear religious symbols in state schools, this shows that it isn't the wearing of them as such that is incompatible with the ideal of secularism within French public education, and the idea that a small crucifix is somehow more acceptable than a headscarf is absurd. What about a wristband bearing the Star of David? Or a glove? Still small enough, or already too big? The proportion of the French population in favour of the ban is also not to the point. This is a freedom of belief issue, and for freedom of belief to mean anything people need to be able to articulate their beliefs, short of incitement to violence or other provably harmful instances of their doing so.

I also find it difficult to believe that in schools or classes where it has become impossible to teach the Holocaust, the situation would be improved by a ban on the wearing of headscarves. The problem obviously needs to be handled, as does that of the 'alarming rise in anti-Semitic attacks' (and I don't mean handled in the spirit of Chomsky's recent claim that anti-Semitism 'scarcely exists' in the West, a remark some of his blogospheric defenders have judged to be perfectly reasonable.) But a ban on religious symbols doesn't seem like a good approach.