Be still my heart.

And again.

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Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about? . . . People [hiding] even when no one is looking for them?

Jack Gladney, the hero of Don DeLillo’s great novel, White Noise, asks himself this as he searches out a university colleague who always makes it extremely difficult to find her. The novel is full of characters “avoiding situations,” as one of them puts it.

“I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely.”

People in Gladney’s town, Blacksmith, drape themselves in oversized sweatsuits and create state of the art all-inclusive houses so they rarely have to go out. Their massive cars have darkly tinted windows. There’s a shared undifferentiated paranoia which drives people in on themselves. Some of his neighbors belong to tiny hidden cults.

In other words, the hijab and burqa were just waiting for us. Hiding’s what you do when it’s like this out there. UD‘s surprised it took this long for an entrepreneur to see the possibilities.

Eat my dust!

“I would expect that [there will] be increased measures to make sure concertgoers can have a great time, but do so without getting killed.”

Oxford is loath to look closely

At the money it took from Max Mosely.

“Why should we eschew?

Oh – that business with Jews.

All rumor and poppycock, mostly.”

“[A] majority of Canadians [want the niqab banned.]

[O]ne survey has as much as eighty per cent of the population [in favor]…

[Stephen Harper’s] statement that the niqab is ‘not how we do things here’ is not wholly fatuous. Liberal societies are not neutral arrangements of civic services supplied to all. They aren’t just public-service condominiums that pick up trash and direct traffic. They have values. Indeed, their ability to supply those services—their prosperity, the reason everyone wants to come to liberal societies and not to theocracies—is because of those values.

Liberal societies have rules. Those rules, and the values they embody, have been a long and torturous time evolving. One of those values is the value of the agency and autonomy of the individual and, with it, the value—incredibly hard won, over a very long time—of woman’s emancipation, and so with it the belief that you cannot, either literally or symbolically, mask individuals. Women’s right to full autonomy is not optional in our society, and those who regard it as optional are not those who can expect to participate in it as citizens. If you wish to join our group, which will give you maximum freedom for every kind of self-expression and religious practice, you have to respect that the open engagement of one citizen with another—and, in turn, one face with another—is a core value that lets all the other values you enjoy flourish. The face may only be a symbol of our confidence in openness, but our symbols are the things to which we confide our values. As Barbara Kay, a distinguished Canadian journalist with whom I agree on few other issues, writes eloquently, ‘The only societies that mandate the niqab as a social norm are those in which women are considered sexual chattel with virtually no rights. Willed indifference to the niqab is more than tolerance; it is an endorsement of gender-rights relativism in our national home—equality for our women, inferior status for theirs.'”

As in Europe (see my various posts below about the ill-fated, taxpayer-funded love the hijab campaign), so perhaps in not too long a time in America, we must prepare for training in the proper attitude toward women who cover themselves and their children.

Actually, America seems to be tolerating burqas (we’re one of fewer and fewer countries where they haven’t been outlawed) and hijabs quite well – incidents of intolerance/violence appear to be rare. We don’t have laws that permit some employers under some circumstances to keep their employees from wearing a hijab; we don’t have laws that ban hijabs in the public sector. You’ll see such laws in parts of Europe and Canada. Stories about European schools banning the hijab are rampant. Several Muslim countries have significant legal restrictions on burqas, niqabs, and hijabs.

Our need for training derives from two false perceptions:

1. Covered women are oppressed.
2. Covered women need “white saviors” to liberate them from their veils/oppression.

Hafsa Lodi explains that “Women who follow traditional guidelines of hijab keep their bodies and hair covered while in the presence of men who aren’t close kin, usually from the age of puberty.”

Is a pubescent girl a woman? The average age of puberty for girls is eleven. Is an eleven year old a woman? Some girls begin puberty at eight. Is an eight year old a woman? Do I feel comfortable concluding that parents who put their eight year old in face and body coverings are oppressive? You bet I do.

Lodi writes: “As a Muslim woman who doesn’t cover her hair, I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for young women who have the courage to commit to wearing the hijab. It takes guts and an impressively strong conviction of faith to cover your hair in a [looks-based] society.” Here is a person who admires the courage of ten-year-olds who wear the hijab because their parents mandate it. I think we must also conclude that she respects and admires parents who can look at their ten year old child (not their boy, of course; their girl) and swathe her, morning, noon, and night in clothes that tightly cover her head and body. Respects and admires parents who “deprive [their daughter] of her childhood.” We are to take moral instruction from this person.

****************

Do I think it’s twisted that some people think girls from eight to twelve years old (though to be sure plenty of parents put their five and six year old girls under hijabs) are such sexual threats to men that they have to be covered? Do I think that the understanding of herself such a child will adopt over time is twisted? Yes, and yes. Do I think that this form of upbringing is in any way preparing this girl for life in a liberal democracy? No.

I await my reeducation.

UD’s always shocked to find career criminals in high – sometimes the highest! – positions in American universities. Of course Greek universities, for instance, are overrun with administrator/larcenists; but us guys? L’il us?

Donna Heinel will plead guilty; she has put her bribecile in Long Beach on the market, as her real estate agent explains:

Putting the scandal and its legal ramifications aside, this lovely little Long Beach three-story villa is sure to make quite the splash of its own …

… Don DeLillo.

Yes. People really don’t take kindly to finding out that their taxes are paying for campaigns aimed squarely at the liberal values they cherish most.

Plus, there’s a major… er… branding problem with the hijab. Our global associations with it are routinely, completely ick.

[T]he campaign was more interested in promoting sexist modesty codes than upholding human rights or opposing anti-Muslim bigotry… While the campaign would have been in poor taste at any point in time – given that the hijab continues to be enforced upon millions of Muslim women around the world – for it to have come out as the Taliban’s gory gender segregation is endangering Afghan women’s lives is truly repugnant. The hijab is not ‘freedom’ for the women in Afghanistan being killed and threatened for defying Islamic mandates. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are tearing off clothes and even targeting women who do Fighting bigotry against Muslims is no excuse to endorse the hijab, derailing the everyday struggle of millions of women pushing back against religions hegemony in the Muslim world. Those designing the next Council of Europe ad campaign would be best advised to acknowledge that any religious mandated code for women, embraced by autocratic regimes, does not signify freedom.not wear the ‘right’ kind of hijab…

The hijab continues to be enforced on women across the Muslim world, even when it isn’t codified in law.

[And of course on girls: “[Indonesian] schools in more than 20 provinces still make religious attire mandatory in their dress code.”

“Many public schools require girls and female teachers to wear the hijab that too often prompt bullying, intimidation, social pressures, and in some cases, forced resignation.”…]

[I]n Afghanistan or Iran, … many risk imprisonment to defy the hijab’s imposition. It is little surprise that Iranian feminists, such as the Belgian Member of Parliament Darya Safai found the Council of Europe’s campaign, and its misrepresentation of hijab as a symbol of feminism, especially repulsive...

Fighting bigotry against Muslims is no excuse to endorse the hijab, derailing the everyday struggle of millions of women pushing back against religions hegemony in the Muslim world. Those designing the next Council of Europe ad campaign would be best advised to acknowledge that any religious mandated code for women, embraced by autocratic regimes, does not signify freedom.

****************

The reason the CoE launched a love the hijab campaign is that it knows millions of free, and struggling to be free, women hate it. Okay. But they had far better options than trying to make us love it. Here are two.

1. Do not launch a campaign of any kind. Do not go there. As with the burqa, so with the hijab: You have millions of fellow citizens upset in a suppressed way by modesty code women. Since these citizens value tolerance, they are willing to seethe, firmly direct their female children out of eyesight of this reactionary garb, and leave it at that. If you make a big deal out of it, forcing their eyes upon a problem they’ve been able to avoid looking at directly, you’re simply going to make a shaky latency powerfully manifest. What they’ve been hiding from themselves – they really find the hijab pretty dreadful – you yourself will blast out into the open. Drop the idea and make do with the uncomfortable peace secular women have forged with the hijab.

2. If you decide to try again, deal honestly and forthrightly with the hijab’s significant unpopularity with your audience. Do not mindlessly, mendaciously celebrate it and excitedly invite free women to join in the hoedown. Acknowledge that in real terms the hijab is irredeemable. It is not beautiful. It is not joyous. It is for much of your audience an off-putting statement of self-abnegation.

Okay, NOW write your ad campaign. The only real card you have to play is religious liberty. Not that the hijab is beautiful, or diverse, or elating – but that it is a mark of religious fervency, and we are bound as liberals to tolerate religious fervency. Don’t sex it up, in other words. You make yourself ridiculous when you try to make one of the world’s most powerful icons of sexlessness sexy.

I AM A MUSLIM. I EXPRESS MY LOVE AND OBEDIENCE TOWARD ALLAH THROUGH MY HIJAB. WHEN I WEAR MY HIJAB I FEEL CLOSE TO GOD. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THIS. Something of this sort will do.

At an appearance in Drancy, Zemmour asked a woman in a hijab to remove it.

The woman in turn asked Zemmour to remove his tie, arguing that her hijab is a similarly personal clothing choice. She then proceeded to remove her hijab …

… “Hijab is not what makes religion,” she added, “just as wearing a tie does not make you smarter”.

So let us examine this equivalence between a hijab and a tie. Not very convincing at first blush, is it?

It would be convincing if the symbolic value of a tie involved expressing your personal submission to Brooks Brothers. But a tie is devoid of powerful symbolic meaning, beyond maybe saying I’m corporate, or I’m bourgeois, or something. When I was a hippie, ties were worth something symbolically, but that’s gone now. Nor are our thoughts liable to wander, in spying a man in a tie, to countries in the world where men are jailed for not wearing ties; or countries where men risk their lives to be free from having to wear ties.

So, step one in the renewed campaign to increase respect for the hijab: Be honest. Don’t play us secular people for fools. The hijab is very very far from a personal clothing choice. Parents stick hijabs on ten-year-olds and keep sticking them on. Obviously for these millions of little girls it’s not at all a personal clothing choice, and ten-year-olds are perfectly capable of choosing their own clothing. It’s fully imposed on someone incapable of knowing very much about, much less assenting in an informed way to, the laws of Islam. Having from a very young age known no existence in the public realm without a hijab, our ten-year-old is highly unlikely ever to take it off. Doesn’t sound very much like the history of your typical tie-wearer.

And no one will mind – or even notice – if Zemmour ventures outside without a tie on. His family, and larger community, will not shun him. Of course there’s not necessarily community pressure to cover up. But there certainly might be.

Plenty of adult women wear the hijab by choice. Again, I would ask that they not trivialize it so as to make people who might be uncomfortable with it more comfortable. Be honest enough to acknowledge the potent message about modesty and submission to God you mean to carry into the liberal public realm when you wear it.

“The unbridled discretion exercised by the City; its use of the heckler’s veto as an explicit justification; its shifting, post hoc rationalizations; and the City’s invocation of political rhetoric by rally organizers and speakers, point to the conclusion that plaintiff is likely to succeed on the claim that the City engaged in viewpoint discrimination with respect to plaintiff’s political views.”

Hapless, hopeless, Baltimore, city of UD‘s birth, attempts to keep a group of vile people from assembling there. The people sued, and the judge… well…

What does a country destroyed by the debauched greed of five men still produce?

Fantastic photographs. Even their captions can be versified (scroll down).

A baker in Beirut by candlelight.

Beiruti bathed in gossamer at night.

Tonsured by a barber without sight.

Bluewash through the darkened urban blight.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. Few middle or high schoolers are poring over academic articles written by Richard Delgado or Kimberlé Crenshaw. But across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.” …

For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.

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And Brett Stephens:

[N]ote the way in which the controversy over critical race theory is treated by much of the left as either much ado about an obscure scholarly discipline or, alternatively, a beneficent and necessary set of teachings about the past and present of systemic racism in America.

But C.R.T. is neither obscure nor anodyne. It is … a “politically committed movement” that often explicitly rejects notions of merit, objectivity, colorblindness and neutrality of law, among other classically liberal concepts.

That’s no reason to ban teaching it or any other way of looking at the world. But it is dishonest to argue that it is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing. It is even more dishonest to suggest that it exists only in academic cloisters…

No wonder the debate over C.R.T.-influenced pedagogies in public schools — which liberals insist don’t even exist in the state’s public schools – although they clearly do – had such a galvanic effect on the Virginia race. It exposed the myth that the illiberal currents at play in the United States today are solely a Republican phenomenon. They are not.

See the post directly below this one for background.

One needs to parse the pro-hijab Council of Europe message to understand the problem here.

BEAUTY IS IN DIVERSITY.

AS FREEDOM IS IN HIJAB.

Let’s start with the first statement. Variety is the spice of life, I grant you. But surely not everything that meets the eye in a highly diverse environment will strike everyone as beautiful; and indeed given the notorious subjectivity of the concept “beauty,” mixed in this case with the feel-good vacuity of the sentence’s sentiment, it’s not terribly surprising that a lot of people were turned off. Karabash has a richly diverse urban setting, with unusual bright red water features, but I don’t find it beautiful. Los Angeles is highly diverse, with gated communities for billionaires down the road from rancid encampments, but I don’t find this diversity beautiful. The hijab campaign means to educate me, to make me more tolerant of people who wear hijabs; but it starts with an insult to my intelligence.

Plus, I’m not sure defending hijabs as diversity really… works anyway. I mean, they’re diverse from what non-hijab wearers wear, to be sure; but within the hijab community the whole modesty point is to make children and adults all pretty much look alike, right? Not a very diversity-positive community.

With the second statement, real trouble ensues. Beauty is to diversity as freedom is to the hijab. So… beauty inheres in diversity, just as freedom inheres in the hijab. The hijab is as obviously about freedom as diversity is about beauty. To wear a hijab is to say I am free. I am a free person, a free woman.

Now, if the campaign stated

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS AN IMPORTANT FREEDOM.

I AM FREE TO WEAR A HIJAB.

no one would have complained. But if you are trying to say to me that you are free because you wear a hijab, that when I see a woman (or, horribly, a child) in a hijab I’m supposed to say There goes a free person. The hijab proves it. I’m going to refer you to Orwell’s 1984. You are not going to be able to make me believe that the very opposite of the truth is true.

I’m perfectly okay with all sorts of religious people marking their submission to God in any number of ways, but the whole point of this gesture, you understand, is to publicly reject “freedom” as the French, and ol’ UD, understand it. So the campaign lies, and since most people don’t find lies very persuasive, the campaign fails.