An interviewer poses a question to the head of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims.

The Austrian government banned full-face coverings in March this year. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria want to do the same. What is your opinion on such a ban?

This ban is unnecessary, and the legal decisions run the risk of being politically instrumentalized. In Germany there is not a single woman who wears the burqa, and most of the women who wear niqabs – we estimate there are not more than a hundred – are visitors from abroad. This debate gives fuel to the populists and serves the agitators.

A strange answer on many levels. The questioner did not use the term burqa, but rather the phrase “full-face coverings.” While I’m sure we can all appreciate the distinction between the generous niqab (you get an eye-slit) and the blinding burqa, I’m not sure any of us gives a shit – symbolically, humanely – about this distinction. The language of the various laws certainly doesn’t distinguish.

Nor am I sure where this guy gets his “not more than a hundred” figure, but anyway no one much cares about numbers either – something burqa/niqab defenders still don’t seem to understand, since, like this guy, they think that if they can only point to a problem in the hundreds rather than thousands we’ll be okay with it. How many cruelly constrained and erased women and little girls in my midst am I comfortable with in a democracy? Answer: None.

But hey they’re visitors!

Oh well in that case. That makes all the difference in the world.

When this man assures us the “ban is unnecessary,” and when he identifies a desire for a ban exclusively with populists and agitators, he reveals … a certain comfort with the current situation…

In the first lady’s own social media, she made note of the “great strides being made towards the empowerment of women” in Saudi Arabia, which seems like quite a stretch in a country where women cannot drive, guardianship laws are enforced and clothing serves as a form of patriarchal control. She, like the president, may not have come to Saudi Arabia to judge or to tell others how to live, but whitewashing social inequality in a tweet is another matter entirely. In that context, her black jumpsuit became a combination of passive approval and transactional acceptance of clothing as a form of imprisonment.

Well. That’s refreshing. A French academic admits that there are women in countries like France and Austria (Austria just joined the long list of counties banning the burqa) forced – forced – to wear a burqa in order to leave their house.

Now I ask you. Is that a nice thing for a democracy? That women are treated like that?

UD also likes the way the article’s writer rapidly softens what Alouane just said. Haha those pesky “more traditional” families – not flat-out traditional, not that, but just, like, more traditional than other French and Austrian families… Wouldn’t want to get anywhere near a word like reactionary for a man who forces his wife to cover her mouth and her eyes and every digit on her hands before she can go outside. No it’s just one of many diverse traditions, like female genital mutilation. And although Alouane clearly says “forced,” our cleanup crew hastens to use the word “reluctant”…

Sooooo… The argument here is that we should oppose burqa bans because the men who are currently threatening their wives with violence if they don’t wear them will, under the ban, threaten them with violence if they go out of the house at all.

Since 1990, the estimated number of girls and women in the US who have undergone or are at risk of the practice has more than tripled. The increase is due to rapid growth in the number of immigrants from countries where risk of FGM is greatest. These girls and women are concentrated in California, New York and Minnesota.

… Burqa.

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UD thanks Barney.

Despite its appalling political cowardice – its announcement that it will refuse to call mutilation mutilation, but will instead call it cutting – the New York Times seems to have allowed the truth – the true word, mutilation (“[F]emale genital mutilation is the accepted term, and it’s the term WHO uses. Mutilation shows the gravity of the practice. You’re damaging healthy tissue and altering it in ways that may be permanent, for no medical reason.”) – to slip through in at least this one column. This remarkable column.

FGM is a cultural practice with one key aim: To control an emerging woman’s sexuality by physically removing the most sensitive part of her anatomy. In the back-and-forth dialogue on FGM over its religious association and clinical definition, there is one psychological aspect of FGM that continues to be ignored: sexuality as voice. A woman’s ability to feel and express herself is an extension of her voice. When little girls are stripped of their ability to feel, and are later shamed for expressing (or wanting to express) themselves sexually, it’s a form of mental abuse that silences the most primal form of communication: sex. It strips them of their ability to discover themselves before they have even reached the threshold of womanhood.

In these cultures, girls are cut off from themselves psychologically and spiritually far before the barbaric genital mutilation takes place. Girls are violated at the earliest age, trained to be obedient and submissive.

Shireen Qudosi really gets at it.

Don’t forget to add to this picture of womanhood the burqa: Female Oral Mutilation.

Egyptian Ilhami Agina
Wants ladies to have no vagina.
“And also no clit.
For it’s certain that it
Helps enormously with my stamína.”

A lower caste being named Merkel
Dressed neither niqabal nor burqal.
Quick! Someone grab
At least a hijab!
The woman’s gone downright berserkal.

He seems to be under the impression that these women (and girls – some are put under the burqa at eleven, twelve, years old) are able to make this decision for themselves. Maybe some are.

But UD finds it odd that Nawaz addresses not a word to the many men who make their wives and daughters wear burqas.

[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.

It’s kind of like telling eight year old girls that they really should think twice before getting their clitorises removed and labia sewn up. Or fourteen year old girls that they probably shouldn’t get married. It might be better to address your concerns to their parents and guardians.

… the New York Times (scroll down to the Celia Duggar statement) will now refer to this practice as Female Genital Reaccommodation.

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A thoughtful review of terms.

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“You were born into a female body which automatically labeled you a defect[ive] human being in need of reconstruction.”

Fascinating, lengthy, follow-up in the Atlantic to a cultural relativist’s take on don’t-call-it-mutilation.

I feature the above comment because it reminds us that in many pro-mutilation cultures, it’s not just removing the clitoris and tying up the labia of three year old female bodies; it’s about hiding those bodies under burqas and punishing their misbehavior with honor killing.

Honor killing is too brutal a term for it, though, isn’t it? It will only alienate these communities. UD proposes honor cutting.

“Men need to feel comfortable, to say, ‘Yes, I am proud to marry a woman who is not mutilated,'” she says.

The Butcher of Livonia goes to jail. No bond. Good.

Since she’s a product of one of this nation’s best medical schools – Johns Hopkins – and because the name Johns Hopkins is about to be dragged in the mud big time, I’m thinking a statement dissociating themselves from this woman would be a good idea.

An even better idea would be revoking her degree. If degree revocation means anything, doesn’t it mean this?

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Zero tolerance will also include some of the following:

The parents could face charges of child neglect, child abuse, and transporting their children across state lines for the purpose of criminal sexual activity. Since they transported the children across state lines, the charges are federal and have combined penalties that could lead to sentences of over ten years in federal prison. Even if the parents aren’t charged with crimes, their children could be permanently removed from their custody. Additionally, depending on their immigration status, they could also be deported from the United States. Federal law allows for the deportation of immigrants if they break the law, explicitly mentioned in the statute is “aggravated felony.”

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[One of the victims’] father told a child protection investigator that “if they knew what would come of it, this would never have happened,” the petition stated.

All we wanted to do was sentence our seven year old girl to a life of humiliation, shame, pain, anguish, and sexual mutilation; had we known we could get picked up for it, we’d for sure not have done it.

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It’s all the more shocking that a female doctor would engage in such practices. As an American female physician myself and as a human rights defender, I demand that, if guilty, the doctor be prosecuted to the fullest extent with the harshest punishments, though a federal imprisonment of five years (the current maximum sentence) seems paltry in comparison to the crime.

Without question, if found guilty the doctor in question must be stripped of her license to practice medicine permanently and be rendered a felon. Her alleged longstanding deception of parents (who claim they did not know, some reports suggest) and of the local medical community should also influence the severity of her punishment.

… These girls can never be made whole again. At age 7, years away from their own sexual knowledge, denied an intact clitoris, they will never experience sexual gratification as consenting women. Yes, they may be able to have babies, but their pregnancies, labor, and deliveries will be high-risk because of the profound anatomic destruction to the birth canal. And this is not even accounting for the incredible psychological injury they will come to experience.

A good strong headline. A woman who allegedly butchered many seven-year-olds confronts justice. Here’s hoping it discourages other butchers in this country in the same line of work.

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Half a million girls.

And democracy.

They’re never too young to enslave – especially when they live in democratic countries that might start giving them ideas.