Ann "Babe" Huggett
Busby Burqa's fashion follies
By Ann "Babe" Huggett
The French definitely know fashion. From the elegance of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent to the theatricality of Jean Paul Gaultier, they know how to dress the female form. Even their First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was a fashion model and earned up to $7.5 million a year during the '90s for strutting the catwalks of such designers as Sonia Rykiel, Christian Dior, Karl Lagerfeld, Givenchy and Christian Lacroix.
So it should come as no surprise then that France's President, Nicholas Sarkozy, has gone on the offensive against a growing trend among France's female Islamic population of donning the totally enshrouding, personality obliterating, head-to-toe garment with mesh over the eyes known as the burqa or it's "kinder" slits-for-the-eyes cousin, the nigab.
Addressing a historically rare joint session of both houses of the French Parliament at Chateau of Versailles last Monday, Sarkozy stated, "In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement — I want to say it solemnly; it will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic."
President Sarkozy is right; the burqa is NOT a "religious" requirement! If it was, it would be worn universally among Muslim women past and present in ALL Islamic nations. Veiling started in the mid 1970's in Egypt as a visual signal by militant female Muslims of their approval of aggressive Islamic activism. The concept spread like wild fire although the Egyptian and Turkish governments, which understand the symbolism of the veil, have been actively fighting it ever since.
In her book, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, UCLA Anthropology professor and author Fadwa El Guindi categorically states, "In Egypt, the Islamic dress worn after the mid-1970's by women replaced modern secular clothes and is part of the grass-roots activist movement."
In other words, Islamic dress, whether it is the simple hijab headscarf or the ghostly burqa is a visual flag of Islamic aggression, rejection of Western principles and refusal to assimilate to the modern World. Veiling and all its variations are a sign of Islamic resistance to what they still perceive as colonial powers and since Muslims are now the colonists of Europe, the burqa is segueing into a sign of Islamic colonial dominance.
It is, in effect, GANG CLOTHING and is used and abused as the militants within Islamic communities see fit. Stories are rife within the EU and the UK of male criminals eluding capture by donning burqas and slipping through politically correct police dragnets. Burqas have been used by both male and female suicide/murder bombers to conceal their explosive belts. Burqa clad thieves are having a field day because eye witnesses or the ubiquitous CCTV cameras can not identify them after the fact.
Burqas and nigabs are quite useful when conducting fraud through Western courts and identity centers. Can any judge or Department of Motor Vehicles inspector really know just who is under that cloth when the wearer refuses to be seen because of "religious" demands? Burqas aid in covering up domestic abuse which is endemic within Islam because it approves of wife beating.
Islamic women who refuse to be press-ganged into Islamic dress are often brutalized by their fundamentalist husbands and families. Even non-Muslim women in France are donning some form of Islamic dress in order to avoid being attacked by the increasingly violent, Islamic, slum-dwelling "youths" of the banelieus ringing Paris and other major French cities.
When non-Muslim women have to take on protective covering, then it is time to step in and that is precisely why President Sarkozy is taking his stand. Since 2004 France has banned the headscarf in public sector venues and schools but had to do so at the expense of legitimate religious expression by cross-wearing Christians and kippah-wearing Jews. The burqa and nigab represent a far more insidious form of Islamic cultural aggression and even the Islamic French-Algerian Paris City minister, Fadela Amera, is for legislation banning the burqa as is Dalil Boubakeur, who heads the Paris Grand Mosque.
The Dutch are paying close attention to the French handling of the burqa issue too since their Islamic communities are becoming increasingly hostile and aggressive. In the US, Muslim women continually claim that their veiling resistance is a religious demand but they have met with limited success depending on how politically correct their state is. Currently in New Jersey an Islamic corrections officer in Essex County was told repeatedly not to wear her headscarf while doing her job but she did it anyway under the guise of "religion." She was fired and naturally sued since that was the whole point of the exercise; many times a woman's local imam will tell her to provoke an incident to further the cause of Islam.
What's troubling, however, is that the US Justice Department itself is handling the case against Essex County. Consider U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's recent ominous comments, "The President's pledge for a new beginning between the United States and the Muslim community takes root here in the Justice Department where we are committed to using criminal and civil rights laws to protect Muslim Americans. A top priority of this Justice Department is a return to robust civil rights enforcement and outreach in defending religious freedoms and other fundamental rights of all of our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the housing market, in our schools and in the voting booth."
This is indeed an unfortunate turn of events especially since Muslims in America have been incredibly successful without any previous special privileges under the law. If President Bill Clinton can metaphorically be called the first "black" President then, as founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney believes, President Obama can be labeled the first "Muslim" President.
When even one's own government becomes complicit in aiding and abetting Islamic cultural jihad, it becomes necessary to frustrate it through civic involvement and political push-back. When a so-called religion starts imposing itself on non-believers, it morphs into a political force and should be fought in the courts as such. On the surface, a hijab is a simple, and some might say even trivial, piece of cloth, but what it represents in the wider picture is Islamic aggression, cultural jihadism and creeping sharia law.
France gets it. Holland gets it. Turkey and Egypt get it. Now let's see if America gets it.
© Ann "Babe" Huggett
June 25, 2009
The French definitely know fashion. From the elegance of Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent to the theatricality of Jean Paul Gaultier, they know how to dress the female form. Even their First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was a fashion model and earned up to $7.5 million a year during the '90s for strutting the catwalks of such designers as Sonia Rykiel, Christian Dior, Karl Lagerfeld, Givenchy and Christian Lacroix.
So it should come as no surprise then that France's President, Nicholas Sarkozy, has gone on the offensive against a growing trend among France's female Islamic population of donning the totally enshrouding, personality obliterating, head-to-toe garment with mesh over the eyes known as the burqa or it's "kinder" slits-for-the-eyes cousin, the nigab.Addressing a historically rare joint session of both houses of the French Parliament at Chateau of Versailles last Monday, Sarkozy stated, "In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement — I want to say it solemnly; it will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic."
President Sarkozy is right; the burqa is NOT a "religious" requirement! If it was, it would be worn universally among Muslim women past and present in ALL Islamic nations. Veiling started in the mid 1970's in Egypt as a visual signal by militant female Muslims of their approval of aggressive Islamic activism. The concept spread like wild fire although the Egyptian and Turkish governments, which understand the symbolism of the veil, have been actively fighting it ever since.
In her book, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance, UCLA Anthropology professor and author Fadwa El Guindi categorically states, "In Egypt, the Islamic dress worn after the mid-1970's by women replaced modern secular clothes and is part of the grass-roots activist movement."
In other words, Islamic dress, whether it is the simple hijab headscarf or the ghostly burqa is a visual flag of Islamic aggression, rejection of Western principles and refusal to assimilate to the modern World. Veiling and all its variations are a sign of Islamic resistance to what they still perceive as colonial powers and since Muslims are now the colonists of Europe, the burqa is segueing into a sign of Islamic colonial dominance.
It is, in effect, GANG CLOTHING and is used and abused as the militants within Islamic communities see fit. Stories are rife within the EU and the UK of male criminals eluding capture by donning burqas and slipping through politically correct police dragnets. Burqas have been used by both male and female suicide/murder bombers to conceal their explosive belts. Burqa clad thieves are having a field day because eye witnesses or the ubiquitous CCTV cameras can not identify them after the fact.
Burqas and nigabs are quite useful when conducting fraud through Western courts and identity centers. Can any judge or Department of Motor Vehicles inspector really know just who is under that cloth when the wearer refuses to be seen because of "religious" demands? Burqas aid in covering up domestic abuse which is endemic within Islam because it approves of wife beating.
Islamic women who refuse to be press-ganged into Islamic dress are often brutalized by their fundamentalist husbands and families. Even non-Muslim women in France are donning some form of Islamic dress in order to avoid being attacked by the increasingly violent, Islamic, slum-dwelling "youths" of the banelieus ringing Paris and other major French cities.
When non-Muslim women have to take on protective covering, then it is time to step in and that is precisely why President Sarkozy is taking his stand. Since 2004 France has banned the headscarf in public sector venues and schools but had to do so at the expense of legitimate religious expression by cross-wearing Christians and kippah-wearing Jews. The burqa and nigab represent a far more insidious form of Islamic cultural aggression and even the Islamic French-Algerian Paris City minister, Fadela Amera, is for legislation banning the burqa as is Dalil Boubakeur, who heads the Paris Grand Mosque.
The Dutch are paying close attention to the French handling of the burqa issue too since their Islamic communities are becoming increasingly hostile and aggressive. In the US, Muslim women continually claim that their veiling resistance is a religious demand but they have met with limited success depending on how politically correct their state is. Currently in New Jersey an Islamic corrections officer in Essex County was told repeatedly not to wear her headscarf while doing her job but she did it anyway under the guise of "religion." She was fired and naturally sued since that was the whole point of the exercise; many times a woman's local imam will tell her to provoke an incident to further the cause of Islam.
What's troubling, however, is that the US Justice Department itself is handling the case against Essex County. Consider U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's recent ominous comments, "The President's pledge for a new beginning between the United States and the Muslim community takes root here in the Justice Department where we are committed to using criminal and civil rights laws to protect Muslim Americans. A top priority of this Justice Department is a return to robust civil rights enforcement and outreach in defending religious freedoms and other fundamental rights of all of our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the housing market, in our schools and in the voting booth."
This is indeed an unfortunate turn of events especially since Muslims in America have been incredibly successful without any previous special privileges under the law. If President Bill Clinton can metaphorically be called the first "black" President then, as founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney believes, President Obama can be labeled the first "Muslim" President.
When even one's own government becomes complicit in aiding and abetting Islamic cultural jihad, it becomes necessary to frustrate it through civic involvement and political push-back. When a so-called religion starts imposing itself on non-believers, it morphs into a political force and should be fought in the courts as such. On the surface, a hijab is a simple, and some might say even trivial, piece of cloth, but what it represents in the wider picture is Islamic aggression, cultural jihadism and creeping sharia law.
France gets it. Holland gets it. Turkey and Egypt get it. Now let's see if America gets it.
© Ann "Babe" Huggett
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