25 June 2015

Since when was the hijab a feminist statement?

.... ‘My hijab has nothing to do with oppression. It’s a feminist statement’. Against a backdrop of lingerie models, bikini babes, and sad western women weighing themselves (still in lingerie), hijab-wearer Hanna Yusuf adopts her primary school teacher voice and asks us, very, very slowly ‘in a world when a woman’s value is often reduced to her sexual allure, what could be more empowering than rejecting that notion?’ Western women, we discover, are dopes to consumerism, brainwashed into buying more diets, thongs and trashy magazines.

The hijabi wearer, in covering her lust-inducing hair, is truly free. There are even background ‘gasps’ to represent the shocked non-Muslim viewer discovering this concept for the first time! HUH?!

[TOP RATED COMMENT] My Hindu ancestors used to have a custom called sati in which widows were sometimes burned alive on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. It was stamped out in India during the British Raj. There is a story, probably apocryphal, that when Hindus protested this ban saying that it was our custom, the British replied that in that case, they should go ahead with sati in keeping with Hindu custom, after which the British would hang all the perpetrators in keeping with British custom.

The credit for stamping out this horrid custom goes both to Indian reformers like Raja Rammohan Roy as well as to the British, but it is a sign of how times have changed for the worse that Brits no longer feel morally capable of prohibiting primitive third-world practices, like putting women in black bags, even in Great Britain, let alone in other countries.

Mark Steyn calls this the loss of "civilizational self-confidence" in the West, and he is exactly right - 50 years of venom vomited out by the Chomskys, Zinns and Susan Sontags on the West have taken an enormous toll.

[ANOTHER] I think everyone is missing the real reason for this religious headgear. It is pure and simply to wind everyone up. The more radical the area, the more is covered up and the more non Muslims get made to feel uneasy. In the free West, it's a statement of sticking the middle Islamic finger up at the rest of us. If someone wants to go around like the grim reaper, minus the scythe, then let them. Enjoy the summer ladies. No one in their right mind would want to wear a bag. Sky god or not.

[ANOTHER] The truth is that wearing a hijab is essentially a statement of separation and refusal to integrate with wider British society. And too often these 'beloved people' are so quick to accuse everyone of racism. Talk about psychological transference. Freud would have a field day studying this type of people. [The Spectator] Read more