UD‘s favorite headline so far from Israel’s close election.

Headlines like At Last, Israelis Are Turning Away From Their Medieval Religious Maniacs certainly sound promising, but even if a secular coalition prevails, Israel will still need to do something about its many varieties of other right-wing cultists. Not only that, but any felt threat to the ultraorthodox will have the haredim pouring into the streets and burning down their neighborhoods. (Note, in the headline, the word maniacs.)

… where things got violent between burqa and non-burqa factions on a college campus there. Burqas have now been banned from the school. It would be good to know who started things. If the model for this sort of outbreak is Tunisia, yikes.

Airport security people in Canada tell a girl to remove her hijab for a moment, and the girl makes a HUMONGOUS fuss and her father threatens to sue over this horror etc. Meanwhile, in the real world, more and more Iranian women are being imprisoned for lengthy periods of time in some of that country’s most dangerous prisons because of their courageous militancy against the compulsory hijab and myriad other theocratic repressions.

Assuming you have any interest at all in the business of women – girls – veiling themselves or being made to veil, UD suggests you’ll spend your time more wisely attending to the women of Iran.

… vagina…’

… receives some legal backing in England, where a high court judge has turned down a request to reinstate an ISIS member’s citizenship.

The father of a British-born student who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS) has lost a legal fight to keep his son’s UK citizenship after he was stripped of it by the former home secretary Amber Rudd in 2017.  

Abdullah Islam had wanted his 22-year-old son, Ashraf Mahmud Islam, who joined IS aged 18 and is now being held in a Kurdish-run military prison in Syria, brought back to the UK to face justice and to be protected from facing the death penalty.

However, in the first case of its kind in the High Court, his case was rejected on Wednesday in a judgement which could set a precedent for other alleged British IS fighters and their wives who face or have had their citizenship revoked.

The judge’s remarks were scathing.

My posts on the issue can be found here (it’s the first seven entries).

Music to UD‘s ears: An ultraorthodox man demands that a woman sitting next to him on an El Al flight move because he refuses to sit next to women. Instead of letting him rant on and eventually force the woman to move, the flight director tells him what it says in UD‘s headline: Fuck off.

As long as Israel’s courts remain real courts (not guaranteed!), her heroine, Anat Hoffman, who with her organization brought the suit that forced gender equality on El Al, will keep winning virtually every case she brings, just the way she won this one.

Hoffman was on this particular plane; she witnessed the exchange.

I was proud to hear the flight director use the exact wording as promised by El Al in court. It was as if she were reading from the verdict itself, stating in no uncertain terms that the in-flight staff would not ask the woman to change her seat. If the staff had acted differently, and if they had, in any way, asked the female passenger to change her seat ‘for everyone’s benefit,’ I would have encouraged her to sue El Al. That passenger did not know it, but she had all of IRAC—a powerful ally—standing behind her.

Before the flight director finally issued an ultimatum to this man, other people on the plane began to pressure the woman to move, practically bringing her to tears. But, as UD‘s beloved Christopher Hitchens used to say, “Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation.”

That was 2016; since then, Angela Merkel has called for a ban.

With its eyes on the Netherlands, where a ban just went into effect, Merkel’s party has once again brought up the matter. It will not go away, and Germany, which already has a partial ban, will eventually get a full one.

‘Quick! Hypertonic saline!’

‘Fuck that. Get this chick an abbayah.’

… lectures the rest of us on the importance of open communication, the only thing to do is laugh.

Talk about self-loathing. It’s not just imperialist Europeans who ban it; Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria… and Egypt’s been trying to ban them for years.

UD in fact predicts Egypt will be the next place the full face and body veil will fall. Meanwhile, welcome, Tunisia, to the developed world.

A New York Times writer brings our cool calm collected American sensibilities to those hot-headed French.

… [T]he veil … especially exercised France since 1989, when three children were barred from attending middle school after refusing to take off their hijabs, setting off months of anguished, often hysterical public debate.

It was the first of countless “veil affairs,” and in this century successive French governments passed two laws: one from 2004 that forbids the veil (as well as the skullcap and large crosses) in schools, and another in 2010 banning full-face coverings such as the niqab in all public spaces. And the freakouts keep coming, most recently during a heat wave in France this week. After a group of women defied the city’s ban on the hooded “burkini” bathing suit at a community pool, a government minister for equality said the burkini sends “a political message that says, ‘Cover yourself up.’”

Really, those silly over-emotional French (and Austrians, Danes, Belgians, Latvians, Bulgarians, Spanish, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Moroccans, Sri Lankans, etc., etc., etc.). have so much to learn from us.

‘They [have] this sense that they [are] being watched and on stage and carrying the torch for equality and cultural change for girls and women.”

US soccer.

[L]et’s examine why we should want a ban on niqabs. Canada is indeed an open and inclusive society. That quality is maintained and cultivated by the steady and full interactions between its citizens. The more we know each other, the greater our capacity for acceptance. The next time you pass someone on the sidewalk, in the park, even looking toward them from your car, notice how automatic it is to look toward their face, make eye contact and exchange acknowledgement.

This is how we “know” the “other” in our society. This is how our common humanity is transmitted. It’s called familiarity. Family. The visual exchange is absolutely powerful in sensitizing and personalizing all of us to each other’s rights and shared humanity.

The niqab prevents that from happening. It portrays anonymity and evokes uncertainty. It is an act of hiding, isn’t it? Consider for a minute whether there would be any argument at all if there was instead the religious interpretation that men should be wearing niqabs and not women. How many Canadians would be clamouring against a niqab ban in that case? I suspect that no country in the world would allow men to wear niqabs, regardless of religious claims. 

This brings the issue back to the gender of niqab wearers. Does anyone believe that it was women who decided to implement the stipulation that they should only be seen by male relatives, that they should be cloaked to all other eyes on the street? Or was it dictated by a patriarchal society that saw women as being subordinate to their husbands’ preferences? In various Muslim countries today, a woman cannot travel outside of the country without permission from a husband or father. Who originated that custom?

Don’t make fun of the noble Grenoblers putting up serious resistance against local women who defy the law and wear burkinis to their city pools. I keep telling you and telling you that France, like Quebec, is a secular place – really truly actually legally and empirically secular. Doesn’t mean you can’t do religion there – means you can’t, in specific public settings, carry your kirpan, wear your burqa, demand sex segregation, etc. Remember the French opera company that stopped its performance until a woman in the front row, in a burqa, left? Mes petites, listen up: The French really mean it.

So they’ve closed the pool rather than allow the women to parade their religious sensibilities there. They’ve fined the women too.

A large and growing number of townspeople pledge to go naked at the pool if there’s a recurrence of the problem, and this seems to UD a sound idea.