June 20, 2006: Bud Talkinghorn: Rebuking the burqa & Homegrown jihadis

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Rebuking the burqa

I love the irony ... when Muslims try to defend the total obscuring of women in burqas. I think it would be an edifying experience for Muslim men to spend just one week (preferably in a heat wave) in such stifling garb. What got me thinking about this topic was a Margaret Wente's column in The Globe and Mail (Thurs, June 15). She (again) made the mistake of attending a U of T symposium on immigration. She caught perfectly how the campus Marxists, and garden variety leftists invariably hijack these events. One even managed to interject the Caladonia situation into the dialogue. Her biggest faux pas was to say that the "burqa had no place in Canada". Some westernized Muslim girl admonished her, saying that "the burqa was worn by choice." She got huge applause. In fact every leftist speaker got a big hand of applause. One professor told Wente afterwards that only prescribed socialist ideology was acceptable at the university.

By coincidence, on the same day, I happened to be thumbing through an old copy of HM-Homemaker's magazine (summer, 1997), when I came across an article by Sally Armstrong entitled "Veiled Threat". The author examines the lives of three Afghani women after the Taliban took over. They went from being highly educated women--engineer, pharmacist,and psychiatrist--to anonymity overnight. They were fired from their jobs, forced to wear a burqa outside, along with being subject to a series of other prohibitions. Considering how crazy the Taliban are, the psychiatrist, particularily, would be needed. One of the women, Fatana, described the misery of having to then wear a burqa and the deadly dangers of the slightest burqa infraction:

"It is hot in here. Shrouded in this body bag, I feel claustrophobic. It's smelly too. The cloth in front of my mouth is damp from my breathing. Dust from the filthy street billows up under my burqa and sticks to the moisture from my covered mouth. It also feels as though I am invisible. No one can see me. No one knows whether I am smiling or crying. The mesh covering my eyes isn't enough to see where I am going. It is like wearing horse blinders. I can only see straight in front of me. When I stumbled and fell, nobody offered to help pick me up."

The article goes on to describe how these women could be beaten with twisted wire if they produced a hand from under the burqa, showed an ankle or made a noise with their shoes. Soon upon ascending power, Mohammed Omar, the illiterate spiritual leader of the Taliban stated as the reason for these draconian dress regulatons: "A womean's face corrupts men". I did mention, didn't I, that there was a profound need for psychiatrists? Big time sexual-psychic problems here. Armstrong catalogues a litany of repressive laws aimed at Muslim women. Their word in court counts for half that of a man's. If a raped woman cannot provide four male witnesses to the crime, then she can be jailed for fornication. Perhaps, the most barbaric is that only women doctors can treat women. If none are available then that is tough luck. "Let them die," the Taliban say.

Perhaps Wente's young university critic should slip one on during the next heat wave in Toronto. To get the full effect she must stick to the preferred black colour--all the better to appreciate that stifling effect. Only then can she understand how ridiculous her "worn by choice" statement was.

This cruel and primitive treatment of Afghani women is just another reason why Canada is trying to stop these Islamic atavists from regaining power.

© Bud Talkinghorn


Our homegrown jihadis--They can see out, but we can't see in

Nothing chills the blood like the alleged Toronto Muslim terrorists. If they had all come out of some cave of ignorance in NW Pakistan, or had spent their educational life nodding and mumbling inscrutable Koranic verses, we could accept their terrorism more readily. But these youths grew up in one of the best countries in the world, one filled with cultural diversity, tolerance and democracy. Yet, these people can harbour a deep hatred for their native land. This, supposedly, because of our support for a free, quasi-democratic (let's not be naive here) Afghanistan. They obviously are ideological blood brothers with the medieval Taliban. If successful they could throw their wives, girlfriends and sisters into burqas. Then the retreat from civilization would begin.

© Bud Talkinghorn