A startling poll released on Friday by public broadcaster ARD showed 81 percent of Germans support banning the most conservative types of Islamic veils from schools and government institutions. The garments they want banned are the burqa, which covers women from head to toe, including the face, and the niqab, which does the same except for a narrow slit instead of mesh square to see out of.
Could we please declare a moratorium on this particular startle reflex? I guess the Foreign Policy guy who wrote this 2016 article was startled; I guess he thought gobs of Germans, and no doubt other Europeans, were fine with public spaces full of degraded women. Will he also be startled to discover that a not-small part of that 81 percent is Muslim? Wow. Gosh.
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UD has rarely seen so graphic an instance of separation between elites and everyone else as she has on the burqa/niqab front. Each time another European country bans these vile shrouds, startled reporters round up indignant people to talk about how nasty everyone in every European country is.
Maybe we could do better than this. Maybe we could stop reacting like this. It’s really dumb.