…. but time and time and time again the court affirms the right of businesses to ban hijabs.

Relying on two previous headscarf-related rulings, the five-judge panel held that employment policies that ban head coverings do not violate EU employment law so long as they are applied in “a general and undifferentiated way.” 

Not sure why, given airtight certainty that they won’t win, the cases keep coming.

The solution for women who absolutely refuse to part with their modesty garments seems pretty obvious: Try to get a job at the tons of other workplaces in Europe that don’t object to modesty garments, or perhaps try to move to a part of the world (Indonesia, for instance, is full of hijabs, and lacks Iran’s violent insistence on them) where no one is going to object to them.

The hijab-obsessed Iranian regime needs help. Millions across the country are stripping off – and burning – their hijabs, a non-negotiable modesty garment as far as the mullahs running the country are concerned. The little hat that hides at least a bit of female obscenity (the body-covering robe women are encouraged to add to the hijab certainly helps even more in the endless task of making women somewhat less obscene) means everything to the guys, and their government’s tanking as much of their population says fuck the hijab.

Short of shooting everybody to death, the government appears to be trying some soft power. Most recently, it displayed, in central Tehran, an enormous billboard with a photo collage of happy proud Iranian women brandishing their wondrous hijab. Immediately a number of the women demanded their photo be removed; they might have worn the thing once under duress, but they hate it and they hate the regime.

Some of these women are high-profile performing artists, and they filmed themselves denouncing the ‘murderous,’ ‘disgusting,’ regime.

Funny, ain’t it, how erasing images of women from everywhere is Job #1 in many Islamic regimes (and of course in their doppelgangers – ultra-Orthodox Jewish circles), but when they start feeling truly endangered they plaster women’s photos in the city square…

Anyhoo here’s the help they didn’t ask for but will now get.

You wanna keep women in hijabs you need to launch a trendy American style campaign, with goofy bold ecstatic young Iranian women dancing wildly while singing a new hit song, inspired by the massive Will Smith hit, Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It. The Gettin’ Hijjy Wit It campaign will transform the hijab from a drab oppressive requirement to a wild and crazy Fun Thing. Trust UD. Give it a go.

Such lovely names in that lovely Raleigh neighborhood: Greenway; Osprey Cove; Bay Harbor. You can just see the place – “single family homes and golf courses.”

As for seeing its mass shooter, here’s a description from a witness:

 ‘He looked like a baby. I just don’t even have the words to explain. This is not OK.’ 

Police say he’s between 13 and 16 years old.

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Enjoy the police chief’s rollicking explanation for this event.

‘I think people are on edge coming out of a pandemic,’ she said. 

‘I think we have mental health issues that are also contributing to that. I believe also too what we’re facing as a nation: the war in Ukraine, inflation, gas prices. 

‘All those things coupled together, I think results in people wanting to solve their disputes or their issues with gun violence rather than just maybe taking a pause, stepping back, and then re-approaching the situation.’

She forgot to mention an uptick in breast cancer cases in Asian women aged 45-65.

Just got back from the object of my pilgrimage: The Cy Twombly collection at the Menil in Houston. As I entered the Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair room, I found myself weeping – not knowing why, not caring why, but weeping. As if that moment – all alone in the beautiful building dedicated to his work, no one else anywhere, the sound of complete silence – were the reason, the real reason, the full reason, UD hauled herself onto a plane from DC and came down here. And – listen up!

After a long stretch of years, I found myself drawn to re-visit the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston this past spring. It felt like a homecoming. I stood in the room containing the polyptych in five parts, “Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair” (1985), for hours, observing the subtle shifts of light and shadow with tears streaming down my cheeks. Twombly’s inimitable handwriting was so familiar, although the colors—burgeoning wine-drunk purples and devastating orange-reds—had been so hard to hold in the mind and the realization that they would slip away from me again was heartbreaking. This has been the one group of works about which I’ve been unable to write. These tender pink blushes and bruised blooms always struck me as too achingly beautiful, almost embarrassingly so, to put into words. They contain all that they need in phrases drawn from Leopardi, Rilke, and Rumi (“In drawing and drawing you, his pains are delectable. His flames are like water.”). More text, it would seem, could only serve [to] diminish them.

That’s a whole other human being, tears streaming in front of the exact same work that brought on my waterworks! Listen to what else Claire Daigle has to say about UD’s way-favorite artist.

It has become something of a cliché to call Twombly a painters’ painter, but with his charmed bookishness, he is foremost, in my mind, a writers’ painter. His gestures move between those of writing and drawing, between drawing and painting. Signs perch on the verge of manifest expression, often evading, occasionally gratifying legibility. His [art] partakes of Hermes’s signs, gathering in force as they range from mark to word to quotation through redaction and negation to clamor and quietude. The chromatic incidents—from tiny gem gleams to full blown detonations—and the extraordinary range of types of mark are felt only by the body, Dionysian. They remind us of all in art that escapes the verbal clutch that would hope to seize that which exists only in moments when the attentive gaze is fully present.

It was Roland Barthes’ essay on Twombly that got me going on the man, and I’ve never stopped loving him

From New York Magazine:

From the first day, I put my scarf in my bag and never put it back on my head. We know that we can be arrested for not wearing our scarves, but we know that people will defend us. And the police know how angry people are. At night, I look online for tips on how to defend myself: if they tie my hands and legs, how I should fight back. We share this information with each other and take it very seriously. 

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What is a priority for me is true freedom, collective freedom — where we have a route to express our grievances. It’s striking for me to see the younger generation on the streets — people in their early 20s. They are extremely brave — more so than I. I think the government itself was not expecting this generation to be this fiery. Any stereotypes about women as fragile and weak are completely gone.

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It’s not unusual to see girls wearing hijab among the protesting students. Girls with scarves and girls without scarves hold hands together and chant slogans demanding justice and freedom of choice to wear what they want. It is common to see women without scarves walking around the city. I saw a young girl without a scarf boldly pass in front of police on the street. A few meters away, some young Basijis ran after her. The girl continued walking slowly. When the Basijis approached her, she turned around and shouted, “What, what? Come on, kill me. Don’t you want that? Just like you did to Mahsa and Hadis?” All three of them stopped dead in their tracks, shock visible on their faces. They didn’t dare say another word.

Even if the government wants to fight to enforce the dress code, it can’t. It’s impossible to count how many women are bravely walking without their headscarves. These days, no morality police can be seen on the streets.

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This is a critique of unequal power relations in all forms — of anyone who is stepping on your rights and limiting your freedom. This critique can be applied in every time and place. The worst thing that could happen would be if people in other countries look at us and see us as poor, oppressed women who are stuck fighting for rights like American and European women did a century ago — that they think we’re at the beginning of the road. People need to understand that our fight is shared with people all over the world including themselves.

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Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to kill me? She’s right – annihilating women under burqas, policing them in hijabs, removing the genitals of baby girls, making them clean themselves up all the time in ritual baths, refusing to sit next to them on planes and buses, erasing them and their images from the public square, making beating them legally permissible, etc. – they do want to kill her.

What’s striking in the scene described is the apparent shock on the part of the Basijis as they confront, no doubt for the first time, this desire.

As for their confronter: She can die protesting in the streets, or she can rot to death behind their shrouding and numbing and homicidality.

… burqa (they’ve had a ban for a while), and as Aljazeera restates the party line on how appalling it all is, let me link to this UD post.

To understand why it’s officially the worst state in the nation, you have to drill down to the details. A routine event hits the national news because it involves (what else) football. The son of an NFL player does that thing. That all-American, but way Louisiana thing. Drives around (maybe drunk) on a Saturday night. Just a tadpole at 21 years of age, but out piloting a huge black Range Rover SUV late at night all by his iddy biddy self. Although he kills a pedestrian … hits and kills an entire adult human being…. he … doesn’t notice. Three days later when witnesses start coming forward his parents get him a lawyer.

I’m waiting to hear he was carrying mucho assault rifles in the car too. All in good time.

And yes, it’s quite likely he waited three days in order to get rid of whatever was in his system.

And the wayest Lousiana thing? Judge will let him off scot free cuz … you know… young, football, booze, gigantic SUVs — it’s not a crime. It’s a way of life.

And I trust he has been severely punished. Ultraorthodox schools can’t let this sort of thing – a student surreptitiously learning enough to pass a basic competency exam – go on: It will only encourage other students to learn things.

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The details are good.

[L]etters written by the rabbi in charge of [one] school’s English department … displayed an apparent lack of fluency in English.

“Bus changes can only be made in the office of Transpiration,” the rabbi wrote in a 2019 letter. Elsewhere, he added: “Any misbehavior will be dealt with in a firm manor.”

That should be Perspiration, and manure.

… is where tons of Twomblys live – in the Menil Collection – and therefore Houston is where UD goes this afternoon – because she is a Cy Twombly freak and even makes pilgrimages. Blogging of course continues.

If you’re having trouble grasping Fussell on the phenomenon of X’s, consider Philip Dybvig.

[I play] instruments such as the erhu and the hulusi. I also enjoy weightlifting, Taiji, Qigong, Tui Shou (push hands), and walking…

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Professor Dybvig’s leisure time is spent playing and composing music, cooking, playing taijiquan, and lifting weights.

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A study in contrasts.

See, here’s how I figure it: Most people are not fanatics. Most people are just people, with this or that personal enthusiasm, this or that religious faith, even this or that fanaticism, but they tend to keep it (because most people consider fanaticism creepy and even threatening) to themselves, or to a few other fanatics with whom they meet by night and howl at the moon or whatever. Extreme extremism just isn’t a good look for most people, doesn’t at all jibe with normal ordinary reasonably contented rather complicated human life, and indeed often manifests to the broad non-fanatic world as abnormal monomaniacal stupidity with a side order of willingness to die and to kill. One thinks of the sad insurrectionists in the US Capitol with their magical MAGA letters smeared on motorcycle jackets and Viking helmets. When these people speak to judges and January 6 committee members, their pitiable condition is broadcast to us all. Watching them, one wonders what new violent insipid Thing will capture them once they’ve served their sentence.

Now in my day (UD‘s an old hippie) the prevailing image was Charlie’s Girls, Manson’s fanatics, who marched off to courtrooms en masse, sporting each day it seemed a new magical MAGA sort of thing: identical chopped off hair, messages scrawled on their foreheads … All fanatics seem to make of the body nothing more than a vehicle for their pathetic passion; all fanatics seem to move always en masse — the larger idea behind all of this being the evisceration of any self for the sake of the God or the Cause.

A theocracy run by religious fanatics will of course try to turn a large, largely normal populace into fanatics – their particular category of fanatics – and they will always fail.

Having failed, and being rigid fanatics, they will then double down:

‘Raisi decided to confront the erosion of support by implementing a plan called “strategies to spread the culture of chastity” – in essence a repeat of a policy first adopted in 2005.

The essence of the 115-page plan, as published by Iranwire, was as follows:

• The introduction of surveillance cameras to monitor and fine unveiled women or refer them for “counselling”.
• Seminary students being placed in residential buildings to monitor how occupants dress in communal areas.
• Hospital staff being required to provide “appropriate garments” to female patients on their way to surgery.
• Fines for any individual who designs, imports, buys or sells “vulgar dresses”.
• New disciplinary policies for female actors who work with the state broadcaster.
• Mandatory prison sentence for any Iranian who questions or posts content online against the mandatory hijab law.’

Peeing myself laughing here. I’m sorry, but we really are dealing with heavy-duty idiocy; and I’d be laughing even harder at all the wonderful language — culture of chastity, counselling, vulgar dresses, appropriate garments (picture women wheeled into brain surgery in full hijab/robe, with surgeons drilling through all the modesty cloth) if the regime weren’t as I write this killing protesters.

Even a former speaker of the Iranian parliament just warned in an interview that “extremism in enforcing social mores leads to extremist reactions.” The regime will probably jail him.

So NOW you’ve got – what? 110% non-support for the hijab? Even many women who wear the hijab – and hijabs aren’t marks of fanaticism until, under the vicious imperatives of violent theocracies, they are – now protest with the no-hijab people.

The cretinous clerics are well on their way to revealing the heart of fanaticism – not piety, or any other form of moral seriousness, but death-cultishness which is always busy drilling down to its deepest truth: It is a sacred privilege to kill anyone who is not exactly like me.

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[Protesters may ultimately] be tried and charged with hirabh, or enmity towards God, which is punishable by death. This may yet get very dark.

The protesters are guilty of enmity towards the regime, not God; but then, being religious fanatics, the regime sees no difference between the two. And in any case (see above) death is what they had in mind from the outset.

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 [T]he daring women of Iran … risk their lives daily for an end to their decades-long imprisonment by medieval fanatics, in this unconscionable, real-world telling of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Bernard-Henri Levy

… Sniffing Your Privates! VOTE BOLDUC, LADIES!

Quebec’s bill prohibiting public school teachers from wearing the hijab remains popular. Here, from this time last year, are comments — from immigrants from Muslim countries — on the bill:

“For me the hijab is a symbol of inferiority even if they [the Muslim teachers] say they don’t feel inferior or superior or equal to men. It’s a symbol of inferiority and I insist on that point,” said Ferroudja Mohand, who immigrated to Quebec from Algeria in 2011.

Mohand said she is worried that her daughter will be influenced by a teacher who wears the hijab at her school and decide to take up the practice. 

“Teachers must be neutral because children are impressionable,” Mohand said.

Ensaf Haidar, whose husband is the imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, said she is “shocked” when she sees Quebec women dressed in Muslim religious clothing given how they are treated in Saudi Arabia.

“The hijab is not a good image for Quebec,” said Haidar, who fled Saudi Arabia not long before her husband’s arrest in 2012.

Djaafar Bouchilaoun, an Algerian immigrant and father of two, told the court he considered the hijab an affront to his “dignity as a man” because it supposes men are sexual threats to women.

A teacher who wears a hijab, he said, is sending “subtle messages” to children. He called the hijab a “symbol of Islamist proselytizing,” adding: “It is pernicious because of it.”

The parents were called by two pro-secular groups — Mouvement laïque québécois and Pour les droits des femmes du Québec — who have intervenor status in the case. 

As part of their defence of the law, lawyers for Mouvement laïque québécois are arguing that rather than strip minorities of rights, Bill 21 upholds the rights of parents to have their children receive a secular education.

“This is a necessary condition for the freedom of conscience,” Guillaume Rousseau, a lawyer for the Mouvement, said in a recent interview.

 At the juice stands and shopping complexes that were open, nearly all the young women had their head scarves down, as did middle-aged women doing their shopping. What was transfixing, though, was seeing bareheaded women in central parts of the city where such liberties are rarer, on the backs of motorcycles darting down Enghelab Street, at cafes frequented by university students. At an outdoor mall in eastern Tehran, a young woman flounced past a stall selling shawls and head scarves. “Pack up and go, sir. Don’t you know this is all over?” she exclaimed, sweeping her arm past his wares. “Why don’t you buy them and then burn them?” he suggested, smiling.