The Blond, the Berks & the Burqa

Regarding Boris Johnson's recent remarks about the burqa, condemned by Theresa May and a bunch of trembling Tories as well as the usual suspects, I was looking at this Twitter page admiring the forthright views of true feminists such as the page owner herself when I spotted this:


Corbyn's an atheist.  Strange to see him at prayer.  But has he been traduced?  Here's more on that story.

Among Suzanne Evans's tweets and retweets regarding Boris's criticism of the burkha, such as those by Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who's in a spot of trouble over one tweet, there's this delight:

 Splendidly, British broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer tells a Muslim female caller that the burqa's "a horrible, ghastly dehumanising garment" and a lot else besides.

A fabulous set of arguments on Julia's part!  She's clever, polite and relentless!

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-hiphhw0PY

Meanwhile, Guardianista columnist Polly Toynbee, an atheist, parades her "Islamophobic" credentials yet again. Too bad she lumps Judaism and Christianity in with the "primitives".

"The pens sharpen - Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same - Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies. There are ritual baths, churching, shaving heads, denying abortion and contraception, arranged marriage, purdah, barring unclean women access to the altar, let alone the priesthood, letting men divorce but not women - all this perverted abhorrence of half the human race lies at the maggotty heart of religion, the defining creed in all the holy of holies."

 As Taj Hargey, an imam in Oxford put it, inter alia, in a letter to The Times:

"Boris Johnson should not apologise for telling the truth. His evocative analogy is unfortunate but he is justified in reminding everyone that the Wahhabi/Salafi-inspired fad of female facial masking has no Koranic legitimacy. It is, however, a nefarious component of a trendy gateway theology for religious extremism and militant Islam.  The burka and niqab are hideous tribal ninja-like garments that are pre-Islamic, non-Koranic and therefore un-Muslim. Although this deliberate identity-concealing contraption is banned at the Kaaba in Mecca it is permitted in Britain, thus precipitating security risks, accelerating vitamin D deficiency, endorsing gender-inequality and inhibiting community cohesion."

Update:
O, the irony!  Al Beeb (among others) reports:

"Christine Hamilton has been removed as a charity ambassador after comparing burkas to the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. The broadcaster and wife of UKIP Welsh Assembly member Neil Hamilton sparked outrage on Twitter with her comments. Muscular Dystrophy UK said it opposed "prejudice and discrimination" and had severed all links with Mrs Hamilton."

"Prejudice and discrimination", eh?  For the prejudice and discrimination against women involved in enforced veiling try this for size, and be sure to look at the comment that links to this: http://www.faizaneraza.org/islamic-article-read.php?article_id=31

Supping With The Devil: The shame of today's synthetic Sisterhood

Recently, on social media, I was engaged in a rather heated, albeit polite, discussion regarding the wearing of the burqa and whether it has any place in western society.  The topic of a burqa ban (and how racist such a ban's proponents are) had been raised by a staunch feminist who's been president of a non-Orthodox Jewish congregation, is a women's rights crusader and a supporter of the leftist cause generally, including the whole anti-"Islamophobia" shtik.

I vehemently disagreed with her defence of the burqa as apparel that represents a woman's right to choose whatever she wishes to wear.  I pointed out that not only does this humiliating, imprisoning, stifling sunlight-depriving tent represent male ownership and oppression of women, but that it deprives the wearer's unborn babies of vitamin D, and that if animals were made to peer at the world through a muslin grill there would be a general public outcry against cruelty involved.

Needless to say, most (not all) of the commenters on that social media thread, male and female alike, seemed to prefer her position to mine.  (The unborn babies, I was reminded, have the benefit of vitamin D-added cow's milk in bottles.)

I write "needless to say" because the commenters are largely left-leaning and in some cases members of the so-called "Progressive" strand of Judaism, whose 21st-century male and female rabbis and zealots seem keen (riding roughshod over any dissension) to commit that strand to the espousal of every fashionable political cause under the sun, but who, when it's a choice between condemning Islamic misogyny and remaining shtum, will remain shtum or berate as "racist" those who do sprak out.  But the "misogyny" of Orthodox Judaism, especially strictly Orthodox Judaosm?  Fair game, of course.

Read all about this insanity HERE

It's a lamentable characteristic of left-liberals that in "promoting diversity", non-western cultural norms are tolerated, even when they run counter to liberal values and women's rights.  (Just look at the ultra-crazy path paved in whacko Sweden!)

As I've pointed out before, the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission in Australia was set up originally to fight antisemitism.  But like the ADL in the United States it has expanded its remit to fight all forms of racism and discrimination. And not only that.  It's an avowed promoter of "diversity".  Its logo proudly proclaims so. 

As this splendid article by Nick Cohen in the UK Spectator puts it:

'People talk about their commitment to equality and diversity so readily they must assume there is no conflict between the two. The phrase falls off the tongue as if it were an all-in-one package, and people can ‘celebrate diversity’ and support equal rights without a smidgeon of self-doubt. Until, that is, they have to make a principled choice. Then, whether they admit it or not, they find that they can believe in equality or they can believe in diversity, but they cannot believe in both....' [Emphasis added.]

Read the outrageous facts HERE

As I've pointed out before, the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission in Australia was set up originally to fight antisemitism.  But like the ADL in the United States it has expanded its remit to fight all forms of racism and discrimination. And not only that.  It's an avowed promoter of "diversity".  Its logo proudly proclaims so.

 But what contradictory positions such an approach can lead to, one of the most obvious being, of course. the loggerheads course between denouncing Islamophobia and championing the rights of women.

 As pointed out by Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator here, there are signs that, in recent atrocities against westerners,  females have been singled out for slaughter:

'....The Islamists are deliberately targeting women because in their minds they represent empowerment and enlightenment, and also immodesty. Three young women were among the eight people stabbed to death during the London Bridge attack in June, and many more were wounded, including an Australian, who  recalled her attacker screamed “Stop living this life” as he slashed at her throat.

 In the hundred years since female emancipation began gaining momentum in the West, there have been significant reactions in the Islamic world. The first was the creation in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, its founder, Imam Hassan al-Banna,  demanding  an “Islamic renewal” faced with creeping Western influence. Al-Banna wasn’t a fan of the West, especially not Mae West, nor Jazz or bobbed haircuts, raging against the importation of “half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theatres, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims.”

One of the Brotherhood’s most influential figures in the post-war period was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who went to the USA on a year’s scholarship in 1949 and returned home radicalised. Another World War had imbued a fresh generation of young western women with confidence and Qutb was disgusted by the female students he encountered in Colorado. He wrote of attending a dance where “the room convulsed with the feverish music…dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips”.'  (See also here)

American feminist Professor Phyllis Chesler is a woman of wisdom and integrity, whose latest article deserves a wide readership.  A feminist since the 1960s who deplores the double standards of today's "feminists", she has much to say on various aspects of the double standards syndrome and its consequences.

Inter alia:

'Our original feminist vision was radical and transformative. We believed in universal human rights. We envisioned multicultural diversity but we were not multicultural relativists....

Like other American radical feminists, I was active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements. Unlike other feminists, I had “once lived in a harem in Afghanistan.” This is the opening line of my book, An American Bride in Kabul. Quite unexpectedly, I lived in a polygamous household in very posh purdah—which meant I was not allowed out without a male escort. Quite surprisingly, my father-in-law had three wives and 21 children—facts my Westernized husband failed to mention during our long American college courtship.

When I was 20, I saw Afghan women stumbling around in burqas—sensory-deprivation isolation chambers, ambulatory body bags. These ghosts were forced to sit at the back of the bus. This was long before the Taliban arose. I remembered that sight even when I critiqued American sexism, racism, homophobia—and imperial overreach....

In the early to late 1970s, I delivered feminist speeches in Israel, began working with Israeli feminists; led a delegation of left-wing and feminist journalists to Israel; obtained signatures opposing the UN’s “Zionism=racism” resolution; co-organized a press conference and then a legendary conference about feminism and anti-Semitism and about women and Judaism; co-founded the first feminist Passover Seder which we held in my Manhattan apartment—and created Jewish-feminist life-cycle events. I also worked with Muslim dissidents and artists from Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, Iran, Lebanon, etc. During this time, I published three more feminist books....

I can tell you that anti-Semitism—Jew-hatred—is not new among feminists. I first encountered it in the early 1970s among radical feminists and lesbians and ... immediately began exposing it.

Read an interview with Phyllis Chesler HERE

However, a new and what I describe as a “faux feminism” has arisen in the last 30 years, a postmodern and postcolonial feminism that passionately condemns Christianity and Judaism as the greatest danger to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason; an intersectional “faux feminism” that condemns only Western imperialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism, and religious and gender apartheid; a “faux feminism” that is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, minds, and genitalia world-wide–including those women who are being forcibly face-veiled, death-threatened, and honor killed in the disputed territories.

Women’s studies associations, national feminist organizations—many feminist Jews—are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” They are currently more concerned with the religious sanctity of head and face veiling than they are with FGM, forced face-veiling, honor-based violence, polygamy, child marriage, and honor killing in the West. Not only have faux feminists betrayed the Jews—in the name of anti-racism, they have also abandoned tribal and immigrant women of color—Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus—to barbaric misogyny. Above all, they have abandoned the most heroic ex-Muslim, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu feminist dissidents, both in the developing world and in the West.

And that’s the tragedy—that so many Western feminists have become such conformists. They are no longer independent thinkers. Faux feminists have also been persuaded that Islam is a “race,” not an ideology or a religion; that America’s historic enslavement of black Africans, and South Africa’s apartheid regime, is exactly the same as alleged Israeli discrimination against Arab Palestinians, including Jew-hating bomb makers and terrorists with blood on their hands.

Fundamentalists are trying to destroy what feminists have accomplished....

The battle for women’s rights is central to the battle for Western values. It is a necessary part of true democracy. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the 21st century is joined.

.... Like many people, I had assumed that the world’s hatred of Jews had ended, that Jewish history would never again repeat itself. I was wrong. Those who still believe that Jewish history can never again repeat itself must dispense with that illusion. Jewish history has always repeated itself and may continue to do so until the coming of the Messiah.

One of the things that’s new about the “new” anti-Semitism is that it is coming to us both from the Islamic world and from the Western intelligentsia—and this time it’s global, and 24/7, via videos, the internet, cable vision, doctored footage, etc.

....In 2003, I published the first edition of The New Anti-Semitism. I wrote that anti-Zionism is the new-Anti-Semitism—and I held the Western intelligentsia responsible for their alliance with Islamic-style Jew-hatred. My Berkeley-based editor fought with me about this. Back in 2003, what I was saying was considered heresy. It still is.....'

Read Professor Chesler's entire article here

Would Brandis & pro-Burqa Bedfellows Expect An Animal To Peer Through a Grill of Mesh?

In the Australian Senate on Thursday, a bizarre-looking, frankly scary, figure with the look of a big black crow sits in the chamber, having been let in with scarcely a concern for security.

An assurance from an acquaintance  that the figure draped in what resembles a garbage bag was who she purported to be was enough to allow the figure to slip in, with no demand that she reveal her face.

The figure was, it soon transpired, indeed the controversial Senator Pauline Hanson, whose wrapping herself in a burqa stunt was performed in order to demonstrate just how lax security in the Australian Parliament is, and to request of Attorney-General George Brandis during Question Time an assurance that, given the terror threat, wearing the burqa be banned in public places in Australia.

As seen on video, George Brandis was not amused by Ms Hanson's stunt and unmoved by her request.  Not that Brandis was unmoved, mark you: his voice trembled and tears bid fair to trickle down his cheeks as he berated Ms Hanson for offending Muslims.

Not a word passed his lips about the offence the grotesque garment called the burqa gives to womankind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDf-5ygFXGk

Conservative columnist Andrew Bolt notes:

'First, Brandis — and Senators of the Left — savaged Hanson for wearing a burqa, but many voters would know these same MPs would have applauded the “courage” of a Muslim MP wearing that alienating sack.

Second, Brandis dangerously elevated the burqa as an important symbol of Islam — a “religious garment”.

Labor’s Penny Wong was as bad, praising the wearing of the burqa as a “sincere act of faith”.

That’s troubling.

Apologists used to claim the burqa was just a backward tribal thing that did not represent nice and sweet Islam at all. But now it apparently does.

Third, Brandis, voice cracking with emotion, then got to the heart of his problem with Hanson’s burqa, and this is not just troubling but alarming.

“It has been the advice of each Director-General of security … and each Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police with whom I have worked that it is vital for their intelligence and law enforcement work that they work cooperatively with the Muslim community,” he blustered.

“To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments is an appalling thing to do.”

Let me translate: do not mock or criticise the burqa or more Muslims will attack us.

Sorry, but I don’t want us cowed by such threats. The burqa is an abomination, and no threats should stop me from asserting this feminist truth.

Does anyone tell gay activists to stop dressing up as nuns or Christians may blow us up?

What Brandis has in fact said is that Muslims are dangerous, and the burqa represents them.

I hope Brandis is just exaggerating the extremism of most Muslims.

But I certainly know he’s kowtowing to a radical minority who want their women bagged and hidden from view.

That is unacceptable....'

Sure is.  But I'd make an additional point regarding these politicians' motives; they're out to catch Muslim votes, and (as with these pro-Islam wets representing the churches) if women's rights, welfare and dignity have to be sacrificed in order to achieve that aim, then so be it.

Leftist hypocrisy regarding feminism and Islam can be clearly seen in many of the comments on Bolt's article.

One earnest leftist tells those who agree with Pauline Hanson on this issue that they belong in Victorian Britain.  O, how laughable (that is, if it were not so very sad!) A male apologist for that misogynistic oppressive garment the burqa telling those who oppose it that they (and not he) belong in a time and place where women (like females under Sharia today) were in subjugation to patriarchal tyranny!

Inevitably, among the champions of burqa-wearing was Greens leader Richard Di Natale, that weaselly foe of Israel, pictured below (front centre) with some buddies.

As a doctor of medicine, Di Natale cannot be ignorant of the danger to unborn babies the wearing by pregnant women of a garment that blocks out sunshine poses: he has obviously heard of rickets and its causes.  I suppose he's happy with the advice that burqa-clad women compensate by dosing themselves with milk fortified with Vitamin D.

But what about the deleterious effect on women's comfort and eyesight that accompanies being encased in a stifling sack and forced to peer at the world through a grill made of mesh.

Perhaps Senator Hanson should borrow somebody's Fluffy or Fido next time, put its head in a burqa, and watch the reaction of senators to that.

I'll wager that they'll label as cruelty to animals (and rightly so) the cruelty they are content to have women endure.

(Unless, in the case of Fido, they recall something about Muslims considering dogs unclean, of course.)

Al Beeb Defends Women's Rights & Western Values (video)

Um, not.

In some parts of the Muslim world women are severely beaten, even killed, by their male overlords for daring to throw off that abominable tent-like garment, the burqa.
 
In northern lands women who wear it deprive themselves of sufficient sunshine, thereby subjecting their offspring to the risk of rickets.

Western women who have worn this cloth prison as an experiment have reported how stifling and uncomfortable it is.

In several Middle Eastern countries Muslim women, when given the chance, and when not subject to reprisals from Islamic misogynists, have been glad to dispense with it.

In Saudi Arabia and in Iran brave female activists have rid themselves of surplus coverings in public, to strike a blow for female human rights.

In Turkey, women who appreciate the freedoms initiated by Ataturk have joined mass demonstrations against imposition of a conservative dress code.

Yet the BBC, which knows these things well enough, has seen fit to make the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUVWVBrPsTM

No wonder that BBCThree, which made it, is copping flak on Twitter.

Yet there are always the Leftist apologists for Islamic values that reflect the mindset of the BBC itself. 

What a weird lot of feminists these BBC types are.  

As with the ABC here in Australia:

Patriarchy rules  OK.  Just as long as Islamic, not western, patriarchs are doing the ruling.

O, The Irony! The ABurqaC of it

"There are signs that anti-Muslim bigotry is now contaminating community harmony at large. This week Sikh Australians have said they are becoming targets of racial abuse. As happened following the attacks of September 11, innocent Sikh Australians are being mistaken for radical extremists because people are linking turbans to terrorism."

So observes Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, in the wake of the recent terror raids on a number of Muslim homes in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and the presence of around sixty Australian Muslims among ISIS fighters.

Of course, such attacks are to be deplored, but the failure to distinguish Sikhs from Muslims is not restricted to racist rednecks, as the observation implies.  This Facebook page created by Aussie leftists at the end of last month has, a less-than-impressed Sikh commenter points out, mistaken an historic  photograph of a Sikh camel-driver in the Australian outback for a Muslim:

 O, the irony!

But I digress.

The question of whether or not to ban the burqa is a hot topic (or perhaps more accurately put a hot potato of a topic) in Australia at the moment.  The central question has hinged on whether or not to ban burqa-clad would-be visitors to Parliament House in Canberra on the grounds that it constitutes a security risk, though there are some politicians who are calling for a general ban on the burqa in public places.

To quote from an ABC News report of today:

'A decision to force Muslim women who cover their faces to sit in a separate glass-enclosed public gallery in Federal Parliament has been slammed by Australia's Human Rights Commissioner.

Speaker Bronwyn Bishop and Senate President Stephen Parry have approved new interim rules at Parliament House applying to anyone wearing "facial coverings".

The Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) said: "Persons with facial coverings entering the galleries of the House of Representatives and Senate will be seated in the enclosed galleries. This will ensure that persons with facial coverings can continue to enter the Chamber galleries, without needing to be identifiable."

The enclosed galleries are usually used by visiting school parties.

Senate President Stephen Parry told parliament that it was a "management measure in relation to .. control of the public galleries".

"If there is an incident or someone is interjecting from the gallery, which as senators would know happens from time to time, they need to be identified quickly and easily so they can be removed from that interjection," he said.

"Or if they are asked to be removed from the gallery - and we need to know who that person is so they cannot return to the gallery, disguised or otherwise."....

The new security controls also stipulate that anyone receiving a pass to enter the private areas of Parliament House will have to show photo ID.

"Procedures are in place to ensure that DPS Security manage any cultural or religious issues relating to this in a sensitive and appropriate manner," DPS said.

Senator Parry said "if people have a cultural or religious sensitivity in relation to this they will be given the privacy and sensitivity that is required in relation to that identification"....'

A burqa in Oz: ABC News photo

The report continued:

'Labor Senator Penny Wong [one of the top women in the ALP parliamentary Opposition] asked why senators had not been consulted, and Greens leader Christine Milne said it was "appalling"

 They will be relegated to an area of the parliament which is usually reserved for schoolchildren - behind glass, where parliamentarians don't have to see or hear them," she said.'

But not being seen by men – and after all the majority of members of Parliament are men – is the whole point of burqa-wearing, isn't it, Christine?

 (O, the irony!)

I heard Christine Milne declare on Channel Nine News that in Australia nobody should be discriminated against: she was referring not to the misogynistic burqa but to that glass partition!

 (O, the irony!)

To return to the ABC report:

 'Independent MP Andrew Wilkie likened the rule to "religious apartheid" and said it was "deeply wrong".

 "The decision by the Government to isolate, in their own rooms, burqa-wearers observing the Parliament has no security merit at all," he said in a statement.

"Religious apartheid"?   Of those whose garments already symbolise religious apartheid from the kuffar?

(O, the irony!)

Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who had been interviewed on ABC24 about the burqa earlier in the day by an accommodating anchor,  tweeted:

("No one should be treated like a second-class citizen ..."  O, the irony!

To quote Herald-Sun columnist Susie O'Brien:

'Face-obscuring Muslim burqas have no place in Australian society....

 Experiencing the world from behind a piece of mesh is no way for any woman to live....

 What does the burqa say about the women who wear them? I just don’t buy the line that they should be free to choose this form of clothing.

It’s not freedom for a woman to be totally covered up in public at the behest of a man, or a religion dominated by men.

It’s not freedom for her to be prohibited from freely interacting from those in the community around her.

We didn’t fight so hard for gender equality in our country over the past two centuries to have people turn up at the eleventh hour and make women feel bad about themselves all over again.

I know that some defend the burqa as a symbol of religious freedom.

But this completely ignores the fact that the clothing itself is a symbol of the subjugation of Muslim women at the hands of Muslim men.

Let’s be very clear about this – the burqa is not a religious symbol mandated by the Muslim faith. If you don’t believe me, read the Koran. Rather, the burqa is a cultural symbol, rejected by many muslims.

We need to speak out about what the burqa represents.

But I don’t think a ban is the best way to do this.

A burqa ban would be extreme and would risk turning those who objected to the law into matyrs.

In Australia there are better ways to promote the genuine rights of Muslim women, and helping them find ways to become better integrated into our Western society is the place to start....

Besides, it’s not the women who should be singled out and punished. If anyone should be punished, it’s the fathers and husbands who force or coerce women into wearing burqas in the first place....

We don’t need to ban the burqa in Australia.

But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak out against it and everything that it stands for.'

Fellow Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, who terms these grotesque dehumanising misogynistic garments "shrouds of oppression", also abhors what they represent: male supremacy and the notion of women as sexual beings and as chattels of their husbands, but similarly opposes a ban.

Professor Phyllis Chesler, an American with first-hand experience of Islamic misogyny, has written a scholarly and absorbing account of the meaning behind the burqa, and (o, the irony!) attempts in the Islamic world itself to ban it, which makes a very powerful case for proscription and should be read and reflected upon by policy-makers and public alike.

She concludes:

'The same Islamists who subordinate women also publicly whip, cross-amputate, hang, stone, and behead human beings. Iran continues to execute women and men by stoning for adultery. The burqa reminds us of such practices. Many Westerners, including Muslims, ex-Muslims, and Christians, Jews, and Hindus who have fled Muslim lands, may feel haunted or followed when they see burqas on Western streets. Does their presence herald the arrival of Islamist supremacism?

Many Muslim governments know something that their Western counterparts are just learning. Covered women signify Islamist designs on state power and control of political, military, social, personal, and family life. Were these designs to be extended to the West, it will spell out the end of modernity, human rights, and the separation of state and church, among other things; in short, the end of liberal democracy and freedoms as now practiced.

Apart from being an Islamist act of assertion that involves clear security dangers and creating mental and physical health hazards, the burqa is a flagrant violation of women's most basic human rights. However, were the government to attempt to ban the burqa in the United States, a team of constitutional legal scholars would have to decide whether to follow the French ethnicity- and religion-neutral approach of no "face coverings," "face masks," etc., or whether to ban outright the public disappearance of women's faces and their subordination in the name of Islam as a violation of their civil rights.

It is impossible for Western governments and international organizations to prevent the acid attacks or honor killings of women in Muslim countries who refuse to cover their faces, but why tie society's hands on Western soil? Why would Western countries prize the subordination of women and protect it as a religious right at a time when many Muslim states refuse to do so? When it is understood that the burqa is not a religious requirement but rather a political statement—at best merely an ethnic and misogynistic custom—there is no reason whatsoever for Western traditions of religious tolerance to misconstrue the covering of women as a religious duty at a time when the vast majority of Muslims do not see it as such.'

The analyst and commentator Daniel Greenfield has also written such an article, giving five reasons why the burqa should be banned.

1. The Burqa Covers Up Abuse

Countries where the Burqa is commonly worn also have higher rates of domestic violence.  In Afghanistan 87 percent of women reported experiencing domestic violence. In Pakistan that number goes as high as 90 percent. Domestic violence is also a major problem in Saudi Arabia.

In cases of domestic abuse, the Burqa doesn’t just isolate the woman, it also covers up evidence of the abuse. It gives the abuser the freedom to brutalize his partner without worrying that anyone will even notice.....

2.  The Burqa Justifies Sexual Assault on Women Who Don’t Wear It

n response to a gang rape, the Chief Mufti of Australia said, “If she was in her room, in her home, in her Hijab, no problem would have occurred.” By wearing the Burqa or Hijab, women participate in a narrative that gives rapists a pass for sexual assaults on women who don’t dress the way the Mufti or Imam says they should....

Banning the Burqa protects women who choose not to wear it from being assaulted because of their perceived immodesty.

3.  Civic Participation

The essence of a modern society is that it extends civic participation to everyone. Deliberately preventing an entire gender from participating in society as identifiable individuals is an assault on the democratic character of the state....

The Burqa is designed to impede interaction outside the home. The failure to be recognized as an individual is dehumanizing and deprives women of their role in civic life.

Countries where the Burqa is in wide use, have low rates of female civic participation....

4. Segregation is Discrimination

Purdah segregates women at homes and the Burqa segregates them in public. While the authorities cannot interfere with what people choose to do in their own homes—the public wearing of the Burqa is a statement that women are unequal and must be segregated.

Such an attitude is an assault on the legal place of women in society. It imposes the norms of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on the streets of Paris and London....

If radicals are prevented from making public statements about the inferiority of races, why should they be permitted to assert the inferiority of a gender.

“Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other,” the Koran asserts. Replace ‘women’ with any race or religion, and a public assertion of such a thing would be cause for criminal proceedings.

Imposing the segregation of the Burqa on women in an assertion of a bigoted creed that dehumanizes an entire gender. While Muslims are free to believe what they do, a public display that dehumanizes women as a gender by treating their faces as obscene, is an intolerant violation of the norms of civil society.

5.  The Wearing of the Burqa is Enforced Through Violence

....In 2003 a French survey found that 77 percent of girls who wore the Hijab did so because of threats. Women in the Muslim world have been punished by having acid thrown in their faces for not complying with similar demands. There is no way to break through this climate of coercion except by giving women and girls immunity from such demands by banning the source of it. The Burqa.

The Burqa also exposes women to blackmail and intimidation when they deviate from the standard of full body covering. There is a rising number of cases in which women and girls who posted Facebook pictures of themselves in normal clothes have been blackmailed and threatened for it.

As long as the Burqa remains a threat hanging over the heads of Muslim and non-Muslim women alike, no woman in Europe can truly be free from its implied threat to her person and her political freedoms.'

There is also another argument in favour of banning a garment that is an affront to women, an argument that does not relate to the equality of the sexes or to the value and dignity of women, but to the health of the burqa-wearer's unborn children, owing to insufficient sunlight being absorbed through the covered mother's skin, with the consequent deprivation of sufficient quantities of vitamin D to ensure that her infants are rickets-free.

Costume Dramas (Part Two): Burkhas and Niqabs – The Case for a Ban

A compelling if often overlooked argument for a ban on the burkha (the robe with the gauze grille), as well as upon that other face-covering garment, the niqab (the robe with the eye-slit), must surely be the damaging effect that these shroud-like garments have on the health of pregnant wearers’ babies. In Australia, Britain, and other western countries, rickets – a disease of the past among inhabitants generally – is increasing in the offspring of women who wear these all-concealing garments. The reason, of course, is the insufficient exposure of the mothers to sunlight, and the consequent deprivation of the foetuses of Vitamin D. The lack of that vitamin is also causing bone disease among the women.

In some countries – Britain is certainly one – such Muslim women are being given vouchers for Vitamin D supplements, fortified baby formula, fruit and vegetables . This is a typical politically correct reaction – but why is it not deemed politically incorrect for the state to encourage in this way a garment which is a prison for women, designed to protect one man’s sexual property from the gaze of other men?

Australian former Prime Minister John Howard described the full cloaks and face coverings, in contrast to the hijab, as “confronting” for the population at large; British former Home Secretary Jack Straw stated that he’d ask any veiled constituent who came to speak to him to remove the impediment to free communication; Conservative MP Philip Hollobone, who announced his refusal to meet any constituent with her face covered, and delivered what the left-liberal Guardian perversely called “a slur on the burkha", was referred to the race relations authorities; Conservative MP Damian Green, Immigration Minister in the Cameron-Clegg Coalition, has breezily assured everyone that no Continental-type ban on the burkha would occur in Britain – such a ban is “a rather un-British thing to do” ; Conservative MP Caroline Spelman, Environment Minister in the Coalition, debased herself and betrayed other females by describing the burkha as empowering for women – seeing it on location in Afghanistan had convinced that “the burka confers dignity”.

Have people like Spelman never read what women who have worn the burkha or niqab say regarding what it feels like to wear these erasures of their femininity and personal identity?

Here, for example, is a British-born journalist of Pakistani origin, Zaiba Malik, describing her experience of the niqab (and remember, folks, that’s not the one with the grille, which must be terribly hard on the wearer’s eyes):

 “The reality is, I'm finding it hard to breathe. There is no real inlet for air and I can feel the heat of every breath I exhale, so my face just gets hotter and hotter. The slit for my eyes keeps slipping down to my nose, so I can barely see a thing. Throughout the day I trip up more times than I care to remember. As for peripheral vision, it's as if I'm stuck in a car buried in black snow. I can't fathom a way to drink my cappuccino and when I become aware that everybody in the coffee shop is wondering the same thing, I give up and just gaze at it.”

And here’s Elizabeth Wynhausen, a Sydney journalist, who similarly experimented with wearing the niqab:

 “I found that even on a mild spring day, the outfit was suffocatingly hot. The cloak restricted my movements. The veil restricted my vision. The straps pressed on my eyeballs. With my head swaddled in cloth and my face covered, I felt I could scarcely breathe. The sense that I had become an alien being was more oppressive still.”

The banning of the burkha and the niqab can be justified on the grounds of health and safety alone. It’s not just the risk of rickets. The restriction of peripheral vision has caused car accidents even for experienced wearers, and there have been accidents in which wearers have been strangled to death when the garments have become lodged in machinery – this happened recently in Australia, when a young mother’s head covering became entangled in a go-kart.

Tellingly, the disgusted stares that greeted Ms Malik and Ms Wynhausen as they went about their business fully covered was not confined to non-Muslims; there were plenty of dismayed glances from Muslim women dressed less drastically, in hijabs and long skirts. At a recent demonstration against proposals to ban the face veil in public held in Sydney, a niqab-clad speaker railed that "Islamic values are superior to flawed Western secular values”. For women like her (and the men who often compel them to drape themselves in what is effectively a portable form of purdah), the face-covering is emblematic of rejection of the surrounding culture and of integration.

But it’s not as if the Quran makes the all-enveloping garments mandatory. There is no shortage of imams and Muslim scholars who have pointed that out. Syrian universities have banned such garments even as western “liberals” strive to present bans as “Islamophobic”. As the Canada  Muslim Congress observed in a long and thoughtful article:

"We believe that the facemask worn by some Muslim women [is about] political symbolism that reflects the contempt of radical Islamist groups for Western civilisation. Today, the only forces that demand Muslim women to cover their faces are: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Arab World [and Europe], Al-Qaeda, and the Saudi religious establishment. All four groups see women as a source of sin and objects of sexuality, and Canada and the freedom of women in Canada and the West as manifestations of evil sexual depravity. Yet it is worth noting that leading clerics and scholars from both the Shia and Sunni communities have stated quite explicitly that the burka or niqab are not an Islamic requirement, but a cultural and tribal custom."

There is also the security issue: male robbers and other criminals (not only in non-Muslim countries) have dressed in burqas to disguise themselves, and there is also the threat of terrorists concealing weapons.

And for a taste of life in Islamic London see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdRfT76s7UQ&feature=player_embedded