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.

They’re pretty much the last holdout in Europe on allowing the burqa, and like idiots they pride themselves on their tolerance even of cultural vileness.

Years ago, this blog covered the efforts of Muslim students to impose strict gender segregation in British universities, with the enthusiastic backing of the official body in charge of such matters. It took a lot of screaming and crying for this scandal to end.

And after all, having tolerated a branch of Islam rigidly determined to erase women, the Brits constantly have to tamp down further discrimination.

Things like a recent foot race which barred women from participating, for instance, continue to make the Brits look idiotic. The race went off without a hitch and without any women, and only after the thing happened did it occur to someone or other that there weren’t any women in it. So now oh yeah NOW we’re gonna appoint a committee to review that and for sure we shall do er something.

Left and right in Sweden look ready to go: A burqa/niqab ban is definitely on its way.

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Ugh. “Almost 70,000 women are female genital mutilated in this country.”

A very confused Canadian person tells us that she – quite rightly – opposes the grotesquerie of swaddling very little girls in the hijab. But this is only a kind of whispered aside; she is actually indignant throughout the piece that Quebec’s secular government has issued a complaint about an image, in a children’s book, of a very little girl swaddled in a hijab. She sees this complaint as bullying.

No, babe. Bullying is parents forcing body draping on a helpless child.

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She says there’s no knowing how many in Quebec approve of this form of secularism. Oh but there is: Oodles of opinion polls show strong support for banning hijabs in the public realm. That’s what the current national controversy over Bill 21 is about.

Reasonable people can debate whether adults in public sector jobs should drape their heads and bodies; only religious bullies would consider the blanketing of female babies and toddlers defensible.

I mean, even the opinion writer feels the need to disclose that she in fact opposes the thing she’s defending. I wonder why she opposes it. Her argument would have made more sense if she’d spilled a bit of ink on the matter.

Sara Kelany, an Italian MP, gets it said. And indeed Italy seems very close to banning the total-blackout burqa and niqab. In this they are joining many other countries who have decided it is uncivil and uncivilized.

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[MP Andrea] Delmastro said Italy had drawn inspiration from France, the first European country to introduce a full burqa ban in 2011. Since then, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland and several other countries in Europe and around the world have imposed full or partial bans.

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Mona Eltahawy‘s definitive opinion piece.

Turns out to be very simple: You can repeatedly imprison/kill a large percentage of your female population until the only women you see on the streets are swathed head to toe in black, or you can decide that forcing an entire country to share your religious fanaticism is a bad idea.

It doesn’t have the force of law, but indicates where things may be headed.