Burqa returns slavery to America

In America, we cannot ban the slavery that goes on behind closed doors of any family but we can ban the exterior markings of that slavery in our open society.  Every time I see a woman dressed in a burqa, I am disgusted on a number of levels, one that the burqa worn in America is designed to set women who practice Islam apart from the general society with the illusion of "superiority" or "in your faceness", or is it the reality of "subjugation" and slavery designed to force our culture to give "special treatment" to such women.  To show them deference?  That one's working well in England.

Another is that the burqa constricts and binds the woman, defacing her and making her a "non-person," a woman in her shroud before her passing, already dead in life.  In America, the burqa flies in the face of the principles of individual freedom that we hold dear.

As Sarkozy in France, I believe the burqa should be outlawed in the United States.  Mona Eltahawy is a woman who practices Islam and therefore is a Muslim.  Here is what she has to say on the subject:  Ban the burqa from her voice at the New York Times.

Eltahawy wrote in her piece:

I am a Muslim, I am a feminist and I detest the full-body veil, known as the niqab or burqa.  It erases women from society and has nothing to do with Islam but everything to do with the hatred for women at the heart of the extremist ideology that preaches it.

We must not sacrifice women on the altar of political correctness...

Soad Saleh, a professor of Islamic law and the former dean of the women's faculty of Islamic studies at Al Azhar University - hardly a liberal, said the burqa had nothing to do with Islam.  It was but an old Bedouin tradition.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the burqa was a Bedouin tradition much as the robes that the men now wear must have developed from tradition as a tribe moved from one grazing location to another.  No leap of prowess there.

And here we learn that the burqa is not mentioned in the Qur'an.  If you search on burqa, the first link you will find is 'images'.  

Where is this coming from from me on the day of the opening of the U.S. Open?  On the day the front grass must be mowed and the sidewalks edged?  From right here in Christiansburg, Virginia at a shopping mall.

Saturday was a hot day;  a nice day actually and I was leaving a store.  A man and his wife were entering the store.  He was dressed in slacks and a causal, comfortable looking most probably cotton short-sleeved shirt.  The first thing I noticed about the woman was that she was dressed from the neck down in a long plastic raincoat with clothes underneath.  On her head and over her face she had the hijab.

For just a second, our eyes met.  She was walking behind her husband and quickly she cast her eyes down.  This Muslim woman is the new slave in America.  We should be ashamed of ourselves and we must ban the wearing of the burqa in America.  We are about freedom, not oppression and slavery.  We are also about assimilation into one society which is America.

We are not about, as Eltahawy writes, the erasure of women.  When we allow people to enter this nation who have no intention of assimilating but of living lives of changing our culture and walking around parading their chattel with an "in your face" attitude, we have desecrated ourselves and our place as the bastion of freedom.

Remember, the burqa is not about the political control of Islam or about "religion", it is about marking Muslim women just as surely as Hitler marked the Jews.  The Jewish people had the yellow Star of David;  Muslim women have the burqa...

The burqa must be banned in the United States and, as Eltahawy suggests, Muslim women must not be sacrificed upon the liberal elites' altar of political correctness or multiculturalism.  

For an excellent post on multiculturalism among other things, see the Gates of Vienna: Take Care of Your Own written/posted October 14, 2008.