A British/Iranian woman writes the most sensible of the millions of words already written about Boris Johnson having compared women in burqas to letter boxes and bank robbers. UD made the same point she’s making – about the greater wisdom of ignoring his words – in this post.
Shappi Khorsandi writes:
Every part of the burqa/letterbox furore is about political warfare. Johnson knew exactly how to rattle the left and it’s working. Now we are calling Rowan Atkinson a “racist”…
The comedian is now denounced as racist because he pointed out that Johnson was attempting to be funny. And, yes, attempting to be offensive. Atkinson: “All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them.” And remember: All of this was in the context of Johnson agreeing with people on the left that there should be no burqa ban.
As the denunciations and investigations and apology-demands escalate, sensible and humane people, like Khorsandi, will direct us to what we should be thinking about:
Today, in Iran, women are risking their liberty by publicly taking off their hijabs in protests against the forced covering. Shaparak Shajarizadeh was handed a two-year sentence for protesting in Iran against the hijab. She was released on bail in April and has now apparently left the country as exile is preferable to living in a country where speaking your mind leads to arrest.
I wish those who are now calling Rowan Atkinson a “racist” left and right on social media would show more solidarity and generate more publicity for women like Shaparak.
Let the ridiculous Boris Johnson dustup have the effect of directing our attention where it belongs: To the millions of women in countries all over the world suffocating under the veil.
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In other words: These are the words that deserve our attention — written by the late great Christopher Hitchens.
[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate.
At least it’s unnerving to me.
Faithful readers know I have long loved Oreo – also known as Galloway – cows.
UD loves them so much she has elaborate plans to visit places around Maryland that feature them. She loves them so much she has priced houses in places like this.
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And now it turns out that a herd of Galloways has moved in right next door to her house in upstate New York.
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Yes. That precise breed, just around
the corner from her country house.
UD‘s sister-in-law, Joanna,
is staying there now, and sends this
picture of her and the cows.
Let me just say again how unnerving I
find it that those particular cows of
all cows materialized on that particular
patch of earth…
As UD always says, when it comes to the burqa, don’t go there.
If you’re one of the few remaining countries in Europe that don’t ban it – if you’re England – and you don’t want it to be banned (“you” here is your political establishment), do not make an issue of it. Because making an issue of the burqa will immediately uncover the fact that significant majorities in your country would like it banned.
Making an issue of it will encourage citizens to look at neighboring countries, where orderly and effective bans have been implemented.
If you keep it quiet, if you don’t talk about it, the burqa will be an irritant; it will be intimidating; it will be an upsetting sign of the erasure of women within a culture that thinks of itself as liberal and egalitarian… it will be many things, but it will not be front and center, because there are other things to think about.
If on the other hand you allow the provocative language of Boris Johnson, who wrote a recent opinion piece saying juvenile things about burqas, to provoke you, then you’ve fallen into a very bad trap. Your loud and insistent offense-taking will accomplish one thing: It will move efforts to ban the burqa in your country forward.
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The irony of course is that along with his juvenile remarks Johnson came out against a burqa ban; but rather than quietly count him among their (childish) allies, the anti-banners have reviled him as an enemy of all right-thinking people and demanded an apology, a shunning, a banishment, blah blah.
And see what happens when you do that? When you make a big deal of the burqa? When you hurl ridicule of it out of polite society?
The Burka Looks Ridiculous,
and Those Who Defend it Do
Muslim Women Like Me No Favours
headlines a Telegraph article in which Suad Farah responds to Johnson not with rage and condemnation, but with gratitude for his having brought the burqa to commentary-central:
[T]he growth of young women wearing it in the UK is concerning, and it’s something we all need to talk about.
Oh right – even though all anti-banners begin all of their articles by noting the absurdly, vanishingly, small number of women who wear the burqa, their numbers are actually growing, aren’t they… I forgot about that…
This naive notion that, if we just leave the burqa alone, a natural evolution toward democratic values will occur among burqa-wearers, reminds UD of poor David Ben-Gurion’s confident prediction “that the ultra-Orthodox community of Israel would slowly disappear…, melding into the assertively modern Zionist project. The opposite … has happened.”
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[T]he temperature around this issue is rising and if anything the debate has to go far deeper. There are plenty of people who are very angry about these issues and that could have been mitigated if there had been more public debate.
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The burqa is an obvious symbolic and real burden on free societies, and if you let the burden sit quietly and simply bother you occasionally, you can ignore it for a long time. If, on the other hand, you let provocateurs like Boris Johnson force you into language that suggests you’re fine with erased women on your streets, I promise you all hell’s gonna break loose, and you’re going to find yourself with a ban before you know it.
The more honest route, since burqa bans, UD believes, are the wave of the future all over Europe (and all over Canada), the route that doesn’t exhibit bad faith, is simply to state what you quite legitimately believe and act on it: The woman-erasing burqa is a bridge too far for any self-respecting democracy. Ban it.
When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors… then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own — a missive falling somewhere [among] an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.
From an essay about how you make the world safe for Jordan Peterson.
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The second comment is from Grace Schulman, a terrific poet, and poetry editor of The Nation for thirty-five years.
Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.
Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”
I was deeply disturbed by this episode, which touches on a value that is precious to me and to a free society: the freedom to write and to publish views that may be offensive to some readers.
… As Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, put it, the magazine’s apology for Mr. Carlson-Wee’s work was “craven” and “looks like a letter from re-education camp.”
So is walking around town seeking to insert your cock in randomly encountered women. There are even legal problems with these behaviors.
Three years ago, a member of the Stanford University swimming team sauntered about campus seeking said insertion, and was well on his way (“he was caught by two Swedish graduate students making thrusting motions on top of a half-naked, intoxicated, unconscious woman”) when things went awry and he went before a judge.
The judge, Aaron “Boys Will Be Boys” Persky — er, make that former Judge Persky — gave him three months in jail (well, six; but he only served three), but the swimmer wants the sentence overturned since he din mean nothin by it and only after all wanted “outercourse,” not intercourse.
The appellate court was unconvinced. UD can’t wait to listen to the Supreme Court tussle over outer v. intercourse…
…UD glanced up – during a recent
morning walk through Garrett Park – at
a tree with some bean-like tendrils, and
then at the town tennis courts, and
then at the post office/restaurant.
Catalpa?
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Better image from today’s walk:
Definitely a catalpa tree.
Boat check? That’s a new one on UD. Looked it up and all, and found nothing. I think the writer must have meant blank check?
It’s from an article about how Rutgers University does things like give an administrator who lasted one year in his position “a $480,000 sabbatical” year. Rest and recovery after a job well done! Plus you promise not to tell everyone how filthy the school is, right? Cuz we gave you all that money?
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UPDATE: UD thanks Brian, a reader, for explaining “boat check” to her.
Sweet and Low, Sweet and Low,
Grab it to put in your tea.
Grab it from a restaurant
And it will be free!
Over the grifting waters go,
Come from the Commerce desk, and loot
Loot repeatedly;
While the SEC, my little pretty, sleeps.
In Chicago, One Weekend, 66 Shooting Victims, and Zero Arrests
For Every Manafort You See, There are so Many You Don’t
No arrests in Chicago; and “[f]ederal prosecutions of white-collar crime … are on track this year to reach their lowest level on record.”
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I guess that leaves pink collar crime and terrorism?
In the late 1980s, crusading against pornography was a top priority for evangelicals. Mr. Hybels told Ms. Baranowski that he had been told to educate himself on the issue by James Dobson, founder of the ministry Focus on the Family, who had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan to an anti-pornography commission.
Calling it research, Mr. Hybels once instructed Ms. Baranowski to go out and rent several pornographic videos, she said, to her great embarrassment. He insisted on watching them with her, she said, while he was dressed in a bathrobe.
63 people have been shot, nine fatally, since 5 p.m. Friday. 34 of the shootings and five deaths occurred between 10 a.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday…
One paramedic described Saturday evening into Sunday morning as “a war zone.”