Garbanzo Toons

You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time

Both of Detroit's major newspapers run frequent puff pieces on Islam and on local Muslims. If something newsworthy (bad) happens in the Middle East, a Muslim voice, or two, or many, are given a few column inches to blame Israel for the problem. There is always at least one representative from CAIR. There may or may not be a response by a local Jewish milquetoast rather than a strong Jewish voice.

Last week's puff piece in the Detroit Free Press celebrated American Muslim women subjugating themselves by choosing to wear head scarves,

At 19, Sandra Jawad decided she wanted to wear an Islamic head scarf. Her mother's response: a long lecture on how that could draw prejudice and limit her career options. "She told me, it's going to be hard. ... It'll make things difficult," Jawad said, recalling a four-hour talk with her mom in their Dearborn home last July.

Jawad eventually convinced her family to let her wear the head scarf. And six months later, her 44-year-old mother began wearing one, too, spurred by her daughter's religious awakening.

The two are part of the growing number of Muslim women in Michigan choosing to wear the head scarves, known as hijab, with many donning them at increasingly younger ages.

The upswing is driven by increased attendance at local mosques and Islamic schools, where clerics often describe hijab as the flag of Islam.

And the local trend mirrors an increased use of hijab among women in the Middle East and Europe, where Islamic beliefs in Muslim communities have intensified. In the past, women often waited until reaching their teenage years or middle age before putting on hijab, but now, even elementary school-age children are wearing them.

There is some controversy because,

Some "look at us, smirk, stick out their tongues or shout out the window, 'Why do you have that on?' " said Arrwa Mogalli, 29, of Dearborn, who has worn hijab since she was 11. "You have nuns totally covered ... and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we're from outer space."

Drat those accursed Islamophobes! Don't they know that:

. . . regardless of style, the underlying concept is the same: "A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden,"

A few days later in the Free Press letter section, most of the responses were not proper dhimmi responses. Readers wrote in with comments like:

In response to your June 12 article "A return to tradition: More Muslim women in metro Detroit defy stares and prejudice by wearing head scarves": Wearing of hijab is not a return to tradition, but an anachronism and a throwback to a time when religious differences were at their zenith and bred hatred, warfare, crusades, jihad and abuse of women, requiring them to be hidden from the sight of conquering hordes.

A nation's level of civilization is best measured by how safe its women feel in expressing themselves without fear of being attacked. The nations where the practice of covering women is most rampant are precisely the ones where women are treated like property and attacked for educating themselves, seeking financial independence, and finding a mate on their own by freely showing their full nature and intellect.

Cultural diversity is all very fine, but the ones that negate enjoyment of life, encourage withdrawal from others, signal that you cannot make contact with me -- even look at me -- should not be encouraged. Such diversity is not expression of culture but of subtle hatred and undermines core American traditions.

and

So women are analogous to pearls that you have to keep hidden. At one Muslim meeting, it was said that that they are like flowers. What about women are persons who can stand up to men and don't have to hide behind their own skirts?

and especially,

There is no comparison between a covered nun and Islamic hijab. No one living in a Christian community has to worry about armed gangs breaking into a family home to threaten, beat or kill them because their daughters haven't become nuns. Islamic women have to worry about that daily in the Islamic world, and even in European countries Islamic women are subject to "honor killings."

Dressing modestly is a worthy ideal in any religion, but the traditional Islamic hijab is not a command from God; it's a command from Islamic men trying to preserve what they perceive to be the value of a woman as property. If free Islamic women truly want to honor the ideal of modest dress yet break the thought process of women as property, then they'll innovate new fashions that are modest yet don't look like the traditional dress that is associated with female oppression.

So even though our backstabbing MSM and other deluded opinion leaders are working overtime to force a benevolent impression of Islam, some Americans refuse to be fooled. Call us Islamophobes or anything you want. We don't care.

Labels: head scarves, islam, MSM

posted by Harry @ 8:48 PM