An Australian commissioner instructs citizens to stop talking about burqas.
Victoria’s anti-discrimination watchdog wants the burqa debate shelved because it puts Muslims in danger.
Equal opportunity and human rights commissioner Helen Szoke said yesterday that constantly airing the issue threatened the safety of Muslim women on public transport and in other public places.
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“Shelve all debates,” said Mr UD when
I told him about Commissioner Szoke.
“Those deliberative democracy types
are really annoying.”
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[image found here]
Here’s the unveiled verity of a serious university education: It provides a place for you to change in serious ways. It shakes you up.
A Dartmouth undergraduate, Leah Feiger, writes in the school newspaper that she thought she knew how to feel about the burqa. It was about freedom to practice your religion.
Enter Nazila Fathi from Iran. A reporter for The New York Times, Fathi has been instrumental in providing the Tehran perspective and has written countless on-the-ground articles exploring political and social development in an ever-changing Iran. Fathi visited Dartmouth’s campus on May 6 to give a lecture regarding reporting in her native country and touched on the issue of the burqa.
In fielding a question about her opinion of the French government’s viewpoint on the burqa, Fathi responded, “I can’t speak objectively since I don’t support wearing it. If you want to wear it, go back to where you’re from.”
You can sort of see people in Fathi’s audience shifting around uncomfortably. An astonishingly strong, and unpleasant, statement, eh?
Shakes you up.
… and we’re off! The French ban (the first of many, UD predicts, in Europe) has really gotten people talking, and UD is thrilled. Time for a real debate on the total cloaking of women and female children.
At the University of British Columbia, Farzana Hassan gave a lecture on April 16 in which she called for Canada to “pass a law denying public services to women in burqas.”
When she was finished, Najma Mohammed of the B.C. Muslim Association stood up and said she felt insulted.
Which doesn’t take us anywhere near a real debate. But let’s see what else Mohammed said.
Mohammed went on to accuse Hassan of “inciting differences” so that she can make money selling books, DVDs, videos, and CDs.
She said she wears her hijab because she wants to; no one insists that she do so. (Hassan’s law would apply only to the burqa.)
… Hassan asked, “Do you have a question?”
To that, Mohammed replied: “I’m not giving you a question. It’s a statement. I don’t think you are worth a question.”
Still not much progress toward a real debate.
Hassan cited the murder of a sixteen year old Canadian girl who refused to wear the hijab; she described “four-year-olds who are being coerced into wearing the hijab because, you know, the philosophy is they need to get into the habit of wearing it so that when they attain puberty — when this becomes mandatory according to them — they will not object to it.”
Mohammed failed to respond to any of this.
Mohammad needs to sit down and think about how she’s going to defend making children wear hijabs and burqas.
But meanwhile, the main thing is that France has galvanized debate on the matter. The university is a very good place to stage that debate.
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Peter Worthington:
What a woman wearing a burqa in a free society is saying, is that she is a repressed individual, the property of a man, someone who believes in sexual mutilation, and is a prisoner of cultural dogmatism.
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(Update: I originally identified the author of this statement as David Frum. UD thanks a reader for the correction.)
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Oh. Whoops! I thought women could debate. Sorry.
A woman at the University of Doha in Qatar asked German President Christian Wulff why Germany bans burqas in school.
“The conscious decision to cover yourself up clashes with the duty of the state to educate its children,” he said. “Showing your face is part of a free society.”
A person wearing a burqa in Europe appeared to be calling into question the equality between men and women, Wulff said. “But we don’t want to question this equality.”
Bravo.
Newt Gingrich’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday quickly took a turn for the dramatic when the first student to question him brought up his admitted extramarital affair and accused him of being “hypocritical” for espousing moral values.
“You adamantly oppose gay rights … but you’ve also been married three times and admitted to having an affair with your current wife while you were still married to your second,” Isabel Friedman, president of Penn Democrats, said to Gingrich. “As a successful politician who’s considering running for president, who would set the bar for moral conduct and be the voice of the American people, how do you reconcile this hypocritical interpretation of the religious values that you so vigorously defend?”
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Update: Salon’s Alex Pareene quotes Gingrich and then comments:
“I believe in a forgiving God, and the American people will have to decide whether that their primary concern. If the primary concern of the American people is my past, my candidacy would be irrelevant. If the primary concern of the American people is the future… that’s a debate I’ll be happy to have with your candidate or any other candidate if I decide to run.”
The American people are concerned about the future! Which woman will Gingrich next leave his wife for, and how embarrassing/ironic will it be?
Gingrich will continue pretending to run for president until early March, when he “expects an announcement” about whether or not he will continue pretending to run for president.
… to this book, Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia, an essay by Karol Edward Sołtan appears (UD‘s too lazy to slash the l).
But put that aside. This post is about Heller. (Mr UD remembers walking Heller back to her hotel from the Promises of ’68 conference.)
It’s about Heller and four of her colleagues in philosophy departments in Hungary. From an article in Science Insider:
It began last summer with what authorities describe as an anonymous tip to police that taxpayer-funded grants for philosophy research were being misspent. A police investigation began, but nothing was heard about it until last month. On 8 January, the office of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, announced to the press that it was launching its own investigation into the use of grant money awarded to five Hungarian philosophers. The scholars have received grants totaling 440 million forints—about $2 million—to support dozens of research projects, postdocs, and students. The commissioner in charge of the investigation, Budai Gyula, did not name specific charges but implied that there was evidence of wrongdoing.
Outside Hungary, some journalists have called the move a government attack on dissidents. But the right-leaning Hungarian media took a different tack, according to critics. “The press has depicted these philosophers as a criminal gang,” says István Bodnár, a philosopher at the Central European University in Budapest. One of the accused philosophers, Agnes Heller, has appeared on YouTube (in English) to make the case that they are being persecuted.
Here’s Heller’s YouTube.
Here’s an open letter from members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to the president of that organization. There’s an online petition.
This latest attack aligns nicely with the Hungarian government’s new law repressing free speech.
A Washington Post writer talks to one of UD‘s colleagues about George Washington University’s recent decision to bar men from its swimming pool for one hour a week in order to accommodate Muslim women students.
… Ira Lupu [is] a law professor at GW who focuses on church-state issues. I asked him if Muslim women could argue religious discrimination if they couldn’t use the pool because of men, or if male students could argue they were losing out? He seemed to think the latter camp had a better argument due to Title IX’s ban on sexual discrimination in educational programs that get federal money.
“If I was in the [university’s] office of general counsel, I’d say make it the same for men as women,” said Lupu.
… the hicky controversy.
UD doesn’t watch tv… Do all American political tv ads have the music from Halloween playing in the background?
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Update: A reader, Crimson05er, sends UD this parody of political ads. UD and Mr UD loved it.
A Perth judge has ordered that a Muslim woman must remove a full burqa while giving evidence before a jury in a fraud case.
Judge Shauna Deane today ruled that the witness must remove her niqab, or burqa face covering when she gives evidence to the jury…
Ruby Hamad, an Australian-born Muslim, writes in the Sydney Morning Herald:
… [B]y decrying all criticism of the burqa as bigoted, we are actually consolidating its previously tenuous position within mainstream Islam in Australia, and thus hindering the religion’s progression in this country.
When even the so-called permissive West is staunchly defending an article of clothing whose primary function is to deny the sexual autonomy of a human being based on nothing other than her gender, what recourse does a lone Muslim woman have to stand against it?…
A professor at an Indian university refused to teach in a burqa. The student union told her she had to.
The university refused to back her up. She went to the media and made a humongous fuss.
In the wake of a “public outcry,” the minority affairs minister intervened.
After not being able to teach for three months, she is back in the classroom. No burqa.
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Says here that all of the other women teaching at this university have agreed to wear the burqa.
Now that Sirin Middya has lifted the veil, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.
… where ultra-orthodox Jewish women in the hundreds are covering their faces and being mistaken by police for terrorists and annoying their husbands.
A group of these women is demanding a totally veiled school for their daughters, where everyone will wear the burqa.
So annoyed are their husbands that they have gotten a major rabbinical organization to ban the practice. But this won’t work, since the women are under the control of a charismatic burqa-cult leader — a woman accused of child abuse.
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I find most intriguing about the Israeli story the language Israelis and other observers are bringing to burqa wearing. It is the language of pathology. Burqa wearing is a “craze,” it’s “weird,” it’s “obsessional,” it’s a kind of nutty “competitiveness” — who can be the most zealous? It’s a “sexual fetish”, it’s “promiscuous,” it’s “extreme” …
What happened to the language of religious respect most observers have brought to Muslim women wearing burqas in Europe?
