New York Times, June 2007
Increasingly, Muslim women in Britain take their children to school and run errands covered head to toe in flowing black gowns that allow only a slit for their eyes. On a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, groups of black-clad Muslim women relaxed on the green baize lawn among the in-line skaters and badminton players.
Their appearance, like little else, has unnerved other Britons, testing the limits of tolerance here and fueling the debate over the role of Muslims in British life ...
David Sexton, a columnist for The Evening Standard, wrote recently that the niqab was an affront and that Britain had been “too deferential.”
“It says that all men are such brutes that if exposed to any more normally clothed women, they cannot be trusted to behave — and that all women who dress any more scantily like that are indecent,” Mr. Sexton wrote. “It’s abusive, a walking rejection of all our freedoms.” ...
Some who wear the niqab, particularly younger women who have taken it up recently, concede that it is a frontal expression of Islamic identity, which they have embraced since Sept. 11, 2001, as a form of rebellion against the policies of the Blair government in Iraq, and at home.
“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” ...
More: NY Times (with slideshow), VDARE
Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance
Georgia, USA: Little Girls in Headscarves
Mary Grabar, April 2007
Author Mary Grabar was the daughter of traditional Eastern European immigrants who believed in repressing females as a matter of course. But she was able to leave that constraint behind and grow into a free individual because she attended an American school ...
In this piece, she notes with alarm the quiet invasion of misogynous Muslims into her community. She sees a little girl in traditional Islamic dress, and fears that today’s classroom will not provide that child with the liberation that schools of Grabar’s time allowed:
"One afternoon, deep in the poetic reverie the lake and trees and birds inspire, I came across a sight spooky against this natural sunny backdrop: a woman completely swathed in black with only slits for her eyes. The incongruous sight of women, peering out of slits of cloth, in full Islamic regalia, behind the wheels of minivans or paying for goat meat at the Publix is no longer that unusual in my neighborhood, though it still takes me aback. But here on a sunny afternoon, amidst ducks and geese, and gazebos and picnic tables, came this creature who looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past with two small children: the boy around four years old dressed in typical Western clothing of pants and a shirt. The girl, about age seven, wore the traditional headscarf and long dress.
... particularly for those who do not speak the language, facial expressions convey meaning and indicate good will and friendship. I was so used to greeting everyone I passed around the lake with a smile and a hello that in this context the isolation of this woman glared. For all their Simone de Beauvoir-inspired academic talk and analysis about the "gaze," feminists cannot see this blatant disregard for the connection of the woman, particularly the woman who cannot speak the language, with the outside world. Not even able to feel the sun on her skin, the woman was cut off from the human community, encased in a shroud ...
But as I remember the little girl in her headscarf in 2007 I see no such future for her. Indeed it is becoming more common to see college women wearing the traditional scarves, sometimes with blue jeans ... Marie Claire promoted such attire as adapted by designers. The hijab is chic ...
Given the messages of "coexistence," and the dogma of multiculturalism that pervades our educational system, the little girl in the scarf will have nowhere to turn for an alternative to her seventh-century culture ...
Little do the multiculturalists care about the little girl who will become like her mother, walking in a prison of black cloth, isolated, without identity, not even able to feel the sun. But they are the same ones, the ones who so detest their own culture, that they are blind to the barbarism in our midst. It may be too late for the woman swathed in black, but we need to reach her daughter."
Brenda Walker at VDARE comments ...
Am I the only woman who thinks that welcoming millions of these seventh-century misogynous cretins via immigration is as dumb as it gets?
More: American Spectator, VDARE
We are biased, admits the BBC
Daily Mail, June 2007
It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.
It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.
At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.
One veteran BBC executive said: 'There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.
'Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it.' ...
More: Daily Mail, Winds of Jihad