The Council of Europe in this way marks its disgust at coercive woman-erasure. Bravo.

Another high-profile British columnist doesn’t get why her country continues to carry the black mark of the burqa. “Whenever I see them, I never, ever get over the way that I feel. I feel livid — ragingly angry — like I have to do something about it. But what?”

Just exactly what you are doing. Write angrily against it. Continue to despise “the insistent, malicious arguing for separate laws, separate schools, separate communities — for, essentially, ghettos. For the headscarf on female children and the ongoing, mendacious support for the burqa and the niqab, using our own liberalism as a weapon against us.”

Persist in pointing out that there’s nothing liberal about a state openly affiliating with – indeed subsidizing – an organization of cruel fanatics. “I would like us to stop giving tacit support to female oppression from the youngest age — if you have any doubts about agency, let me tell you: there is no way a child who cannot even read yet is able to choose a headscarf.”

“No one wants to curb the poisonous love-in with one of the most woman-hating ideologies on earth.” Actually, lots of people do. But they are afraid of being classed with the right wing. They haven’t noticed that the strongest opposition to the burqa in many of the countries the writer lists comes from the left.

Much of England remains in the look away look away position relative to the burqa. Sartre called what they’re doing bad faith. Liberal states that don’t want to be in bad faith ban the burqa.

England will get there eventually. Honest writers like Camilla Long help it on its way.

… or you think this a twisted and destructive point of view. You think the message this transmits to a child – your primary identity is as a dark sexual object which, for the sake of erotically uncontrolled men, must be veiled – is wounding and perverse. You also think, more generally, that parents have no right to impose things like porny veiling on children who have no say in the matter.

For folks like UD, and for the people of Austria, a hijab ban on schoolgirls under 14 is an obvious and humane law, and as of a couple of days ago, it went into effect.

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Meanwhile, the dummies in England…

Well, a high court in India has certainly shut that down. The judges, in denying a high school student the accommodation, note that none of the school’s other Muslim students wear hijabs.

“Wherever this issue has arisen, the high courts have been unanimous in opinion that wearing a headscarf is not an essential part of the Islamic faith for a woman to don in the absence of which faith would be jeopardised,”[said the judges].

The big fight against the hijab, of course, rages in Iran.

It’s like that Red Rover jingle. The girls and women of Tehran free themselves of the hijab on Tuesday and the government lets them; on Wednesday, they might be jailed/tortured/killed for the same behavior. Hijabi Hijabi Now you’re a dead body…

Daddy’s busy with a war so he can’t focus on spanking his millions of unswaddled, and Iranian women are taking advantage of this. They risk getting hammered again when the war’s over.

And I’m ashamed to say I don’t. Think about them. Too painful.

But here they are – a few of them – taking to the streets and getting killed by the savages currently running the show.

Men marched with them.

As in Iran, the killings will continue. But barbaric sadism has a way of making protests grow.

However. Reflecting on sexism and sexual abuse on the left, in the wake of the Chavez revelations, this op/ed writer notes that the behavior knows no ideological boundaries.

Or religious – this blog has published a zillion stories about clerical sexual abuse.

… after they’ve seen the modern era?

Theocracies like Iran can can pule about purity all they like. They can even kill selected non-hijabis. Secular modernity happened, babes: try twisting your way back to pre-modernity, and you’re only going to twist yourself.

“The Islamic Republic is about to lose one of its three pillars; the other two [anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism] will also crumble in time,” writes Arash Azizi. Id est, the mandatory veiling pillar is currently a pile of dust.

‘The confrontations follow an announcement by Rouhollah Momennasab, secretary of Tehran Province’s Headquarters for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vices, about forming a “Chastity and Hijab Situation Room.”

“With 80,000 trained forces across the province, a major transformation in implementing chastity and hijab policies will take place,” Momennasab said at a news conference.

He called on citizens to join a “people’s observers headquarters” to participate in the monitoring effort.

Momennasab said the situation room will track and analyze cultural and media activities in society, with enforcement strategies communicated to government agencies.‘

Witty Zara. Finding new meaning in an old song.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle, wrote Orwell, and while there are those who, without a struggle, can see the manifest meaning of the burqa, others, as blinded as women and children stashed behind mesh, simply will not perceive it. Countries all over the mideast and Europe have banned it; every week, a new country or province bans it. These places have eyes to see what is in front of their nose. Self-regarding ideologues, on the other hand, see only themselves. They blind themselves to radical misogyny and female enslavement staring at them – through a little eye-slit – smack in the face.

Why should she have anything to do with the so-called laws of so-called Switzerland? This, mes petites, is what people mean when they refer to the failure of (cough) ‘integration.’ She’s like the ultraorthodox in Israel, who see that “country” as the enemy against which God commands them to resist.

Deep Salafist pockets will pay her fines – she will continue to rack them up – until the state decides that the system of fines isn’t working. Next step: A social worker tries to reason with a fanatic. Then jail?

… and one of its political leaders uses remarkably strong language against the thing.

“[I do not accept that women should be forced to] walk the streets as if they were animals or merchandise.”

[Arab women] are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say … [T]oday, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe... People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.

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An essential companion piece.

A Spanish human rights activist argues for restrictions on various forms of Islamic dress in her country.