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.

Thousands of militant hijabis all in black from head to toe and mad as hell cuz turns out some Iranian women aren’t militant hijabis all in black from head to toe — these chicks is real hard to control when they mass in the street and get whomped up about whores who don’t veil. They is spoiling for a fight, and, if the Islamic state doesn’t discourage them, will soon be shaving the heads and then beheading the heads of the hussies. So the president himself went on tv tother day to say okay okay if you don’t want to wrap your whole self in black I guess you don’t have to…

Love the idea of Iran dedicating hundreds of millions to its R U INVISIBLE, FEMALE? technology; love even more our Treasury saying fuck you go ahead but we’ll try to make it hurt.

 Pasargad Arian Information and Communication Technology Company is currently working on clitoral recognition surveillance tools [CRST] that will detect a still-intact clitoris. Once detected, the organ will be targeted by flesh-searing drones.

The wise Finns move toward uncovering their poor burqa’ed children. Brava.

… follow the honor killing trial.

Lovely that the attempted murder was filmed.

Lovely that Fatima has the guts to take the stand.

Not lovely that people willing, in public, to kill their daughter exist among us.

France, Austria: They’re making it illegal to cover up children. Bravo.

The famous final line of The Sun Also Rises will do for our response to the International Criminal Court having “issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, accusing them of crimes against humanity over the persecution of women and girls.”

The sadistic treatment of that country’s female population is the stuff of nightmares, and I guess it does the heart good, or (if they’re allowed to know about it) does the women/girls of Afghanistan good… But the ICC has no real power to do anything in this case, so we’ll have to be content with whatever symbolic value the gesture represents.

In 2021 … 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans — 56 percent — favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology…

[F]ighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.

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U Penn has now rescinded trans swimmer Lia Thomas’s medals.

If veiling is, at its core, about controlling women — and if it rests on the idea that men aren’t responsible for their actions — then refusing to challenge it isn’t tolerance. It’s surrender… We must face Islamist misogyny in the UK, eye-to-uncovered-eye.

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Some say the vile theocrat running Iran may be replaced under pressure of current circumstance. Maybe the next person will toss the mandatory hijab law.

… dehumanizing.

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Consider on the other hand Mona Eltahawy:

A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to women’s rights. One blogger, a woman, lamented that “[then-president] Sarkozy’s anti-burqa stance deprives women of identity.” It’s precisely the opposite: It’s the burqa that deprives a woman of identity...

Why the silence as some of our women fade into black either as a form of identity politics, a protest against the state or out of acquiescence to Salafism?

As a Muslim woman and a feminist I would ban the burqa.

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And consider Marie Gilbert:

As a French feminist, I am surprised to see English-speaking feminists defend women’s right to wear the niqab. The niqab may be a religious symbol (something that is still, however, the object of much debate among specialists of Islam) and one that is (sometimes freely) worn for religious reasons. Those feminists who so openly criticise any stand against the niqab, however, seem to forget that the niqab, beyond its religious dimension, is also, very clearly, a sign of women’s inequality and inferiority. This, rather than an anti-religious feeling or Islamophobia, accounts for the French ban and for the call, voiced by some French personalities, on Muslim women to renounce wearing the niqab.

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Back to the burqa defender —

“The bloodstained perpetrators [are] sitting in the halls of political power,” writes she. Right out of “Politics and the English Language.”