A British/Iranian woman writes the most sensible of the millions of words already written about Boris Johnson having compared women in burqas to letter boxes and bank robbers. UD made the same point she’s making – about the greater wisdom of ignoring his words – in this post.

Shappi Khorsandi writes:

Every part of the burqa/letterbox furore is about political warfare. Johnson knew exactly how to rattle the left and it’s working. Now we are calling Rowan Atkinson a “racist”…

The comedian is now denounced as racist because he pointed out that Johnson was attempting to be funny. And, yes, attempting to be offensive. Atkinson: “All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them.” And remember: All of this was in the context of Johnson agreeing with people on the left that there should be no burqa ban.

As the denunciations and investigations and apology-demands escalate, sensible and humane people, like Khorsandi, will direct us to what we should be thinking about:

Today, in Iran, women are risking their liberty by publicly taking off their hijabs in protests against the forced covering. Shaparak Shajarizadeh was handed a two-year sentence for protesting in Iran against the hijab. She was released on bail in April and has now apparently left the country as exile is preferable to living in a country where speaking your mind leads to arrest.

I wish those who are now calling Rowan Atkinson a “racist” left and right on social media would show more solidarity and generate more publicity for women like Shaparak.

Let the ridiculous Boris Johnson dustup have the effect of directing our attention where it belongs: To the millions of women in countries all over the world suffocating under the veil.

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In other words: These are the words that deserve our attention — written by the late great Christopher Hitchens.

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate.

As UD always says, when it comes to the burqa, don’t go there.

If you’re one of the few remaining countries in Europe that don’t ban it – if you’re England – and you don’t want it to be banned (“you” here is your political establishment), do not make an issue of it. Because making an issue of the burqa will immediately uncover the fact that significant majorities in your country would like it banned.

Making an issue of it will encourage citizens to look at neighboring countries, where orderly and effective bans have been implemented.

If you keep it quiet, if you don’t talk about it, the burqa will be an irritant; it will be intimidating; it will be an upsetting sign of the erasure of women within a culture that thinks of itself as liberal and egalitarian… it will be many things, but it will not be front and center, because there are other things to think about.

If on the other hand you allow the provocative language of Boris Johnson, who wrote a recent opinion piece saying juvenile things about burqas, to provoke you, then you’ve fallen into a very bad trap. Your loud and insistent offense-taking will accomplish one thing: It will move efforts to ban the burqa in your country forward.

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The irony of course is that along with his juvenile remarks Johnson came out against a burqa ban; but rather than quietly count him among their (childish) allies, the anti-banners have reviled him as an enemy of all right-thinking people and demanded an apology, a shunning, a banishment, blah blah.

And see what happens when you do that? When you make a big deal of the burqa? When you hurl ridicule of it out of polite society?

The Burka Looks Ridiculous,
and Those Who Defend it Do
Muslim Women Like Me No Favours

headlines a Telegraph article in which Suad Farah responds to Johnson not with rage and condemnation, but with gratitude for his having brought the burqa to commentary-central:

[T]he growth of young women wearing it in the UK is concerning, and it’s something we all need to talk about.

Oh right – even though all anti-banners begin all of their articles by noting the absurdly, vanishingly, small number of women who wear the burqa, their numbers are actually growing, aren’t they… I forgot about that…

This naive notion that, if we just leave the burqa alone, a natural evolution toward democratic values will occur among burqa-wearers, reminds UD of poor David Ben-Gurion’s confident prediction “that the ultra-Orthodox community of Israel would slowly disappear…, melding into the assertively modern Zionist project. The opposite … has happened.”

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[T]he temperature around this issue is rising and if anything the debate has to go far deeper. There are plenty of people who are very angry about these issues and that could have been mitigated if there had been more public debate.

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The burqa is an obvious symbolic and real burden on free societies, and if you let the burden sit quietly and simply bother you occasionally, you can ignore it for a long time. If, on the other hand, you let provocateurs like Boris Johnson force you into language that suggests you’re fine with erased women on your streets, I promise you all hell’s gonna break loose, and you’re going to find yourself with a ban before you know it.

The more honest route, since burqa bans, UD believes, are the wave of the future all over Europe (and all over Canada), the route that doesn’t exhibit bad faith, is simply to state what you quite legitimately believe and act on it: The woman-erasing burqa is a bridge too far for any self-respecting democracy. Ban it.

… Sour.

If you like what the haredim have done to Israel, you’ll love the latest piece of education legislation out of New York.

A yeshiva advocacy group had sued to stop New York State from implementing the so-called “Felder amendment,” an 11th hour deal to appease a state senator who was holding up the budget…

Critics are focusing their ire at Brooklyn state senator Simcha Felder, who threw the state budget negotiations into chaos and held up passage until he got an amendment to lower the bar on the amount of secular education required for yeshiva students.

… Young Advocates For Fair Education [has] has waged an intense battle to make sure that yeshivas give their students instruction in English, math and other state-mandated subjects.

It’s that old “mandate” again, ain’t it? We’ve got mandates; Israel’s got mandates. But how can they be mandates when the ultraorthodox aren’t mandated to mandate them?

The vast majority of my friends in chasidic yeshiva … still have never even heard the words algebra, atom, or biology… I have heard of no graduates from my chasidic school who have enrolled in college. In fact, the vast majority of chasidic yeshiva graduates do not even obtain a high school diploma…

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And think of the goodies civil society gets in return: Permanent profound welfare dependency. Large numbers of unemployables. A significant minority that thinks the laws of liberal democracies don’t apply to them. Indeed, that barely recognizes the state except as a source of funds.

Your tax dollars at work.

… Her campaign against the mandatory hijab started accidentally. In 2014, Alinejad posted a picture of herself on Facebook with the wind blowing through her hair in London… She received comments from women in Iran telling her how envious they were of her freedom. In response, Alinejad posted still more images of herself to Facebook, similarly unveiled. The difference was that these snapshots had been stealthily captured years earlier, inside Iran, hiking with friends or driving her car. In her posts, Alinejad called for other women to take similar pictures.

She was soon deluged with images, and a campaign was born. Alinejad called it My Stealthy Freedom. Today, My Stealthy Freedom’s Facebook page has more than a million followers, and Alinejad’s personal Instagram account boasts similar numbers. Posts have been accompanied by a changing array of hashtags, the most popular of which has been #WhiteWednesdays, which began last year as a call for women to send pictures or videos of themselves holding up or waving a white veil in public on that day of the week. These days, the videos flood in constantly.

Gradually, in large ways and small, the institutions of liberal democracies affirm themselves.

In a statement [issued on her first day as a Canadian citizen], [Ensaf] Haidar [said] that she wanted to use her first day … to raise awareness about the plight of women forced to abide by Sharia, or traditional Islamic law.

“As a Canadian who was born in Saudi Arabia under laws of Sharia where human rights are non-existent, I realised the power [misogynist] men [have] over powerless women with no rights.

It is for this reason that on the first day as a Canadian I have raised the issue of banning the Burqa and Niqab in Ontario as I feel Premier Ford is a man who will listen to my plea and end the war by deception being waged by Islamists against Canadian values.”

Haider’s husband, a dissident against the appalling Saudi regime, remains in prison there.

… world, mandating assimilation to Danish values. A real blow to cultural relativism, that.

Whew! Long list. At least the world’s largest democracy hasn’t forgotten to keep its women terrified and enslaved.

With today’s Dutch burqa ban, Europe collectively asserts a vision of civic life, personal freedom, and gender equality which our country will want to examine as it faces its own eventual reckoning with the burqa. Most European countries now have partial or full bans, and of course many other countries, in other regions, also ban it.

As UD predicted, bans are now coming so fast and furious that organizations opposed to them aren’t even bothering to issue their boilerplate about religion or personal choice or extremely peculiar philosophies of liberation or whatever the hell they think they are dealing with. Instead one ban after another flies by without complaint, and as they do girls and women smothered by cruel ideologies begin to have a fighting chance to get out from under.

Sing it, Donovan.

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They will bring haredim in a bag
They will take off late with the pious blind
And apart from that they’ll be so kind
In consenting to blow your mind.

Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.
Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.

They will force favors from the ladies
The hours will pass in excellent style
“Would you please move your stinking impiety
To the section of unclean aisles?”

Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.
Fly El Al Airways, get you there past time.

They will bring joy to criminal bigots
And sorrow to law-abiding women
Who, disgraced, degraded, finally give in
For the sake of other passengers
Who sit for hours while El Al assholes
And haredi assholes scream at each other.

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.

What a sexist, ethnocentric, headline.

Denmark’s burqa ban will affect one hundred percent of the women there.

Obviously the salafist enthusiasts who wear it will have to take it off. That is the very least of it.

The reason huge majorities of people of all faiths and genders all over Europe tell pollsters they want the burqa off their streets is that it affects all modern egalitarian civic-minded human beings. It is most damaging to girls and young women, who grow up witnessing the most graphic exposure of — not the inferiority, but the nothingness of women, every day of their lives as they walk the streets of their cities. It is only slightly less corrosive to everyone else, as they suffer basic ongoing offense to their basic democratic instincts. Do I really live in a country where men can blind, deafen, and mute their women? For most rational people, the answer to this question has got to be no. And that is why, one after another, the countries of Europe are banning it.

Denmark, arguably Europe’s most humane and progressive country, has understood where human rights lie in the burqa debate, and has acted on this understanding. As is virtually always the case, the vote in favor of the ban wasn’t even close. And as to popular sentiment!!

Indeed, UD begins to think that the battle for the hearts and minds of compassionate democrats has clearly already been won; it is the benighted elites, who can always, on these occasions, be counted on to tut-tut about religion (the burqa has nothing to do with religion) and freedom (if you can keep your eye trained on a woman in a burqa and keep whistling about freedom, your next stop is corrective surgery) who need help. As one democracy after another bans the burqa, it’s pretty clear which position is on the side of history.

Rather than passively responding to every ban with the same boilerplate about how great it is that women can freely express their right to full shrouding, Amnesty International should join that cadre of international businessmen (where are the women?) who pledge to pay the fines women are racking up all over Europe for continuing illegally to entomb themselves.

Hungary goes down the tubes.