I [disagree] with Muslim women from the left who contend we have to honor women’s free choice to cover their faces … I want to recall here Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that freedom does not end with choice. Choice is the starting point of freedom. True freedom is crossing selfhood borders and opening up to others.

A Webby nominee.

More here.

And here.

… by Saudi journalist Sabria Jawhar.

I have grown to hate the burqa. I hate the burqa because it serves no logical purpose in Western society. The intent of the clothing is to draw attention away from the woman, but in the West it only attracts unwanted attention…

… 94 percent [of the UK’s non-Muslims] believe that Islam oppresses women…

… Most Saudi women, like me, leave the burqa (abaya) and niqab in Saudi Arabia. But I’m guessing that more than a few Saudi girls wear the niqab because their husbands insist on it. The husband doesn’t care whether strangers see his wife’s uncovered face, but he cares a great deal that his Saudi male friends do. [That his] selfishness and warped view of manhood are more important than his wife’s safety is inexcusable.

… Outlawing the burqa will create a tremendous divide between non-Muslims and Muslims. But wearing the burqa in the West is also just plain stupid.

A liberal Muslim woman, she has already been shot and beaten up by Muslim men.

But here she is again, opening a no-burqas mosque.

Read the details, and join UD in fearing for her life.

No kidding.

The leadership of the Israeli city Beit Shemesh has told that country’s courts that everyone’s too afraid to go in and enforce legal decisions. The latest one orders the town to take down its many threatening and humiliating signs — signs that not only tell women how to dress, but order them to keep their vileness away from sacred areas. Ultra-orthodox fanatics in town are now so violently out of control that the whole place has become a no-go zone.

[T]he central commercial area of Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet has become so notorious that it has become known by some non-haredi residents as “The Heart of Darkness.”

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In his ruling on Wednesday, Judge Yigal Marzel decried the lawlessness in the extremist neighborhoods of Beit Shemesh, in which, he noted, the authorities appear to have abandoned the area to violent radicals.

Marzel quoted the response of [the town’s mayor] and the Beit Shemesh Municipality, in which they described the situation in the city as “a war” and “catastrophic,” where extremists are violent toward IDF soldiers, pedestrians and police personnel, throw stones at people and vehicles, and harass and curse people.

“[The state] cannot reconcile itself to this situation, and all the authorities need to take the necessary steps to restore order and observance of the law,” wrote the judge.

The state cannot reconcile itself… Interesting language. It’s like saying I can’t fucking believe this. It doesn’t get you anywhere.

And just as there are people with deep pockets paying the fines of women who keep wearing the burqa where it’s illegal, so UD feels certain there are people with deep pockets happy to pay the penalty ($1,400 per sign every day) the judge will soon impose on lawless Beit Shemesh. For this religious state is in the peculiar position of having decided that the ultra-orthodox of Beit Shemesh are the world’s realest Jews, and thus the very heart and soul of Israel. And now the courts of that country are living with this decision.

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A peculiar position? Only if you forget what Ronald Dworkin said about religious states.

What’s next? France?

Oh. Right.

… Montana.

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.