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Was it something I said?
(Post edited to make a bit more sense)
This post was spurred – although I am infinitely amused – by being characterised as racist fucktard in a burqa on Barefoot Bum’s blog.
In my fucktardy ignorance, I would have thought – along with the UN – that Islamophobia was a manifestation of racism.
****** This Racism 101 class will continue after you’ve all read the Wikipedia page, notably the Runnymede Trust definitions. And yes, it will be on the test ********
For Barefoot Bum, opposing Islamophobia is seen as “racist”. Apparently – insofar as I can make out the argument – because NOT protecting muslim women from themselves – in the face of their own perceptions – is somehow failing them. And ergo, racist. What?
Let me just spell out what a ban on items of clothing that would apply only to Muslims and only to women will mean, in practice. Note that I say “will mean” not “could mean”. In simple terms:
Muslim women would be challenged in French streets for unseemly dress (Yes, just like in Saudi.)
The French are notorious for hating anyone from the middle east. (Well Algerians, mainly, because of their colonial history.) Not all French people, of course, just enough bigots to make life hell for many Muslims. And apparently also for non-muslim sociologists who resist racism.
Some of the said bigots will be in the police force. Some members of the public will demand police action against women wearing burqas. At the very least, insulting women as they go about their daily lives will become more, not less, common. Burqa-wearers will be afraid to appear in the street.
That doesn’t feel like liberation to me. It feels like the first steps to ethnic cleansing.
(As an illustrative aside, a young woman was beaten to death in England last year – for wearing Goth clothes. The morons who did it didn’t even have a weight of ethnic-religious-racial prejudice to make them convince themselves it was OK. She and her boyfriend were just dressed in a way that offended someone’s narrow minded ideas of suitable dress.)
The first time that a woman is forced by the police to remove her coverings will produce a massive rage amongst her family, friends and co-religionists. If this doesn’t drive more muslims into fundy Islamic extremism, I don’t know what would.
Barfeoot Bum talks about women being informally coerced into wearing burqas. I take this to mean psychological pressure. Quite how far does he expect the law to go in policing personal relationships? Protecting the weak-minded from themselves?
Apologies, in that I didn’t plan to rant any more about this. The person adopting the nom-de-comment Bzzt, put all the sane arguments much better in 2 comments on the previous post here. So, I refer you to him or her.
Oh, ffs. How many spurs to blog ranting can a woman take before noon on a Sunday morning?
The Big Question on BBC is debating the question “Should Britain ban the burqa?” (The basis of the topic is French president Sarkozy’s burqa ban) The answer is so obviously “NO” that you wonder how small a question has to be to qualify as “big.”
There follows a fair bit of debate about the burqa and its religious and social significance. There’s a burqa-clad woman saying it’s a religious issue for her. Another one defending wearing a veil as a personal choice. A male muslim scholar saying that burqa-wearing is not an integral part of Islam, anyway: it’s purely a cultural, rather than religious, garment. Nobody really deals with the implications of a ban.
Fortunately, there are no overt BNP speakers, this week, but the show does bring on Peter Hitchens… (Mail on Sunday columnist. Paleoconservative, scourge of political correctness. Christopher Hitchens’ brother – could be seen as almost his Evil Twin.)
The discussion never focuses much on what the concept of a burqa ban really means.
You have to dismiss instantly the argument that banning burqas will somehow “liberate” muslim women. In Europe, there must be already be many avenues of recourse for women who feel that they are pressured into wearing islamic dress, without having to compel those women who want to wear it – for whatever reasons – to abandon it. (Just like the careworkers who feel their very being is threatened if they can’t wear crosses at work.)
It doesn’t matter if their choices are incomprehensible to the rest of us.
Dress or ornaments are forms of communication. If the things being communicated seem absurd or offensive, surely we can challenge them or – Toutatis forbid, on current showing – just live and let live.
If the state gets engaged in ruling about what communication is acceptable, it comes bang up against the concept of freedom of expression.
And Sarkozy as feminist spokesman, indeed. A man whose only interest to the non-French world is his trophy wife.
(A wife who seems to have blithely overlooked Sarkozy’s lack of physical or mental charms, on the basis that he was the French president, in a way that seems unlikely to have happened if he was a shop assistant. Which makes even his wife seem like an odd feminist, unless you can expand the meaning of “feminist” to imply – “does whatever it takes to get wealth and power for herself”.)
Even a Spectator columnist, Rod Liddle, pointed out that
“Saqrkozy’s burqa ban panders to racism not feminism.”
Spot on. A burqa ban is a symptom of racism, not secularism, nor feminism.
Indeed the whole idea could be designed to polarise French society and provide new recruits for muslim extremism – in the same way that the Xian fundies are using every worker who’s told to remove a cross or promise ring to recruit people to their mad groupings.
As if the world isn’t dangerous enough, without creating more and more intolerance. Ah, there’s finally a convincing explanation on NewsBiscuit
“Doctors want right to talk faith” according to an item on the BBC health page about a BMA conference. The piece starts:
Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them. (from the BBC website)
Doctors? Do NHS “doctors”, in general, feel that they have so much spare consultation time on their hands that they need to fill it with philosophical discussion? Well, no.
It’s those pesky members of organisations like Christian Voice, again. In this case it’s the “Christian Medical Fellowship”
The CMF web page title says :”a Christian perspective on Working Overseas, Ethics, Christian Apologetics, Abortion, Evangelism, Faith in Practice and Medical Training” This is too big to show in a browser title bar but you have to admire how comprehensively it gives the flavour of their interests.
They claim to represent 4,500 British doctors. (Scary, huh, if true?) The centrality of proselytizing to their goals can be seen in the literature offered by HealthServe, their overseas mission wing.
Isa Masih, meaning ‘Jesus the Messiah’, was published from July 1996 – April 1999. These back issues contain news from the Muslim world and resources for Christian students who are working towards bringing the good news of Jesus the Messiah to Muslims in universities and other tertiary institutions worldwide. …
What’s spurred their efforts to influence the BMA was the case of a Somerset nurse who offered to pray for a patient, was suspended then reinstated.
This is the sort of issue that the rabid wing of Christianity loves to make much of, and the media love to treat their complaints as news. (Auxiliary nurses told not to wear crosses and all that.) All following a goal of making religious fanaticism seem mainstream and “Christianity” under threat.
A mainstream CofE vicar (debating the issue with a man from the National Secular Society on BBC Breakfast) was aware that an unsolicited offer to pray for a patient would make her seem like the angel of death.
How much more terrifying to a sick person, if the volunteer pray-er is the doctor or nurse who is treating a patient?
If they really think prayer works, wtf can’t they just go off and do it without having to involve the prayee?
I will charitably pretend that they don’t just want to add numbers to a roll of converts (although this is the likeliest explanation for this evangelising) and that they really want to help people. In that case they must instinctively know that any efficacy of prayer comes from the power of suggestion. The prayers, crosses, and so on, are magical rituals and charms that rely on the expectations of the target.
The placebo effect, if it helps anyone get better. However, even the suggestion that your medical professional wants to pray for you would have a pretty definite nocebo effect on anyone, as it suggests that your doctor thinks you are beyond earthly hope.
of course, as the Chaplain pointed out the other day, if Christians really believed in heaven, why would the sick bother trying to stay alive? Or why would believing doctors be so cruel as to try to keep people away from their happy-ever-after afterlife?