NIQAB, BURQA, HIJAB – AFGHANISTAN COMES TO THE WEST

Frontpage: Afghanistan keeps following me right into the West. Headlines abound daily—and there are women shrouded in burqas, hidden by Niqab, and set apart wearing Hijab on the streets of so many American cities.

Minnesotans have just elected the country’s first Muslim, hijab-wearing woman to Congress. Michiganders have just elected another Muslim woman who wore a Palestinian Arab dress known as a thobe as a way to proudly signify her roots. (When a Muslim does it, no question of dual loyalty is ever raised.)

Last night I was in a room where someone was watching the TV show Madam Secretary. I stopped watching this once it became clear how politically correct they are to the point of tedium, and how gracelessly they cannibalize the most recent headlines and give them a more dramatic but hardly accurate spin. I fear this may be how many viewers today get most of their information, but that is another matter.

Tea Leoni’s super-fashionable clothing and how well she wears it is the primary reason to continue watching this program with its mainly likable cast all of whom represent the right skin colors, religions, sexual orientations; alas, they all share only one Obama-like political POV.

Last night, Tea Leoni and Company were again in Afghanistan brokering a deal with a new government which included the Taliban. A young, heavily chaperoned Afghan girl, was on her way back home after having had compassionate heart surgery in America. Some fool on the airplane video-captured her talking and sitting next to the Secretary of State’s right hand man, and sent the video to her own parents who were stationed in Kabul. The video went viral—and the girl’s honor killing was on. The girl rushed to the American Embassy and asked for asylum—and got it.  Providing protection for this one girl who dutifully wore hijab at all times endangered the much larger deal which America had negotiated.

And, like so many girls in her position, she missed her mother and wanted to go home.

Finally, a solution was found. The girl agreed to marry a much older man whose children she would mother. She accepted her fate as “God’s will.” The money for this deal with the Devil was provided by a woman’s NGO based in Afghanistan.

The fictional Afghan girl did not wear a burqa, she wore hijab. I believe that her honor killing male relatives and the Afghan men who tried to storm the gates of the American Embassy expect their women to wear burqas. Perhaps I am wrong.

I have long argued for a ban on the burqa and on niqab, on human rights, women’s rights, and health rights grounds—as well as on security grounds. Until now, I have excluded hijab because a headscarf does not obscure identity and does not prevent its’ wearer from fully interacting with others.  more here