Again, hurray. More and more often, as UD has been noting here, articles about various forms of resistance to women who veil dedicate at least a few sentences to the possibility that this resistance is not islamophobic.
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The term Islamophobia is … used to silence discussion on issues like the niqab – despite the fact that its use is hotly debated by Muslims around the world. Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria have all passed various laws opposing the wearing of garments like the burqa and niqab. These bans are often motivated by security concerns, but they also make it clear that face-covering is not a central practice in Islam. These nations see the niqab as deeply divisive, not only in Western societies, but in their own Muslim-majority societies too.
But rather than argue its case, groups like the Muslim Council of Britain seek to shut down debate altogether. By painting arguments like mine as bigoted and beyond-the-pale, they aim to wrest control of the conversation in favour of another view: that Muslims are perennially demonised and objectified by the very same societies, and media outlets, which allow us to freely express our views.
Qanta Ahmed
So next year’s IKEA catalogue for this community will not eliminate women in their entirety from its pages, as last year’s did.
Next year’s will feature vaginal canals.
…does a much better job than UD (her effort here) responding to a NYT column urging repatriation of ISIS members:
Bryant Neal Viñas writes that the United States should take back “those Western foreign fighters who do not have ‘blood on their hands’ — didn’t kill any coalition forces overseas — and are willing to admit they made mistakes.” This definition of ISIS’s crimes erases women’s participation in this conflict as both victims and victimizers.
By focusing on combat with coalition forces, Mr. Viñas conveniently ignores the kidnapping, rape, torture and enslavement of Iraqi and Syrian women. He also doesn’t acknowledge that both willingly and by force, thousands of women mobilized for ISIS.
Most of these women will not meet the international legal threshold of “foreign fighter,” but they were essential to ISIS’s ideological and operational missions. The women of ISIS served as wives and mothers, yes, but also as propagandists, members of a brutal morality police, slave owners and, toward the end, even combatants.
“Ms. Muthana is an accomplished ISIS member in her own right, having joined one of the top terrorist organizations in the world at the age of only 20,” said FAIR spokesperson Keith Finneran, explaining how terms like “ISIS bride” and “wife of ISIS soldier,” routinely used to refer to Muthana in news headlines, are derogatory in that they credit the woman’s hard-won contributions to the war on infidels to her husband… [Y]ou shouldn’t refer to Muthana as a “female terrorist” either, because the countless hours she’s allegedly spent online calling for the death of Americans makes her just as much of a terrorist as anyone else.
Show me the way to go home
I’m ISIS and I want to go to bed
And after all Islamic-ally you know
It’s wonderful to cut off people’s heads
I’m a Brit and she’s from Alabam
We find ourselves in something of a jam
So listen while we sing our little song
Show me the way to go home.
… became a thing recently for a lot of people inside and outside that country because of a University of Toronto professor’s refusal to cooperate with a new regime under which his very pronoun use was subject to sanctions.
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Now there’s poor Frank Bauer, who comes from the Netherlands, where burqas have of course been banned for years. Head of a refugee assistance group in Alberta, Bauer finds himself part of a strange new world, within whose boundaries even an expression of discomfort with the burqa gets you labeled “racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic.”
What precisely did Bauer write in a social media post?
“I am a strong advocate for being welcoming, inclusive and respecting all cultures and religions, however find full face covering in public a notch too far,” Bauer wrote on Red Deer Local Immigration Partnership’s Facebook page in a discussion about religious accommodation.
“I would not feel comfortable in conversations no matter what the topic is, and believe this is an area where newcomers need to respect and adapt themselves to the Canadian culture and norms.”
Hiding behind a symbolic burqa, anonymous members of the organization’s staff filed a grievance against this bad bad man.
Bauer’s abject apology would have fit right in at a Stalin show trial.
An article about the niqab assures us that it’s entirely worn by choice, ignoring all sorts of evidence that, as Christopher Hitchens wrote, “goes the other way.” (Let’s not even talk about people who put their eight-year-old daughters under them.) The author goes on to endorse a niqab wearer who tells her that if we only learn more about Islam we’ll see the religious grounding for the garment. But those of us who have learned a bit about Islam know there’s absolutely no grounding for it; indeed, it’s illegal in increasing numbers of Muslim countries. Increasing numbers of imams in Europe and abroad have condemned the burqa/niqab.
The article goes on to condemn every one of the several million people in countries around the world who have supported a ban as racist.
Under my foot the veil that once had me down
Under my foot the veil that pushed me around
It’s down to me the difference in the clothes I wear
Down to me the change has come it’s under my foot
Sometimes a headline gives you special access to the lives of girls all over the world.
How dare anyone insinuate that the niqab is restrictive and oppressive. What nonsense!
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The racist political ads the article goes on to describe are disgusting. But they have nothing to do with clothing commercials using the hideous niqab as a way to make an obvious point about preferring self-expression to self-erasure.
…world…
But it wouldn’t be nothing – nothing! – without a woman or a girl to abuse.
There’s Oxford professor in good standing Tariq Ramadan, lying through his teeth as long as he possibly could about his apparent rapes and now ah shit okay I did those two… But they were begging for it… There’s Yale professor in good standing Michael Simons who okay yes I was a bad boy but I’m suing you for a trillion dollars for taking away my named chair…
Behind every great man is a great man; Ramadan has his powerful male supporters; and then there’s Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.
[T]he burqa has already been banned in some form or another in several countries of Western Europe, such as France, Belgium and Austria. The Netherlands and Denmark are the two latest countries to place a ban on the burqa. Bans in various forms, such as bans on burqas in schools and colleges, or other public places or in certain jurisdictions, are also in place in Germany and Norway.
All of these are democratic and technologically advanced countries as well as free societies with high levels of gender equality. The … Freedom House report ranks Norway as the freest country in the whole world, with a perfect score of 100/100. The Netherlands, with a score of 99/100, comes second.
Ban it in India.
… What’ll they think of next?