Alibhai-Brown compares Burqa-wearers to 'anorexics and drug addicts'

Monday, 25 January 2010 07:58

In today's edition of The Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown once again berates Muslim women who choose to wear the burqa.

Alibhai-Brown writes:

'You people who support the "freedom" to wear the burka, do you think anorexics and drug addicts have the right to choose what they do? This covering makes women invisible, invalidates their participatory rights and confirms them as evil temptresses. Does it stop men from raping them? Does it mean they have more respect in the home and enclaves? Like hell it does. I feel the same fury when I see Orthodox Jewish women in wigs, with their many children, living tightly proscribed lives.'

In the Sunday Times, meanwhile, Dominic Lawson penned a far more impressive piece on why 'Banning the Burqa is not British'. He wrote:

'[The UKIP peer Lord] Pearson declared last week: “We are not Muslim-bashing, but this [the wearing of the burqa] is incompatible with Britain’s values of freedom and democracy.” First of all, he absolutely is “Muslim-bashing” — it’s of a piece with his gratuitous remarks in his first interview as party leader that “the Muslim population is rocketing; their birth rate is much higher than ours”. (In that Vienna passage from Mein Kampf, Hitler used the same old “they’re outnumbering us” tactic: “Especially the inner city and the areas north of the Danube canal swarmed with a people who even externally no longer bore a similarity to Germans.”) Second, how is it compatible with “Britain’s values of freedom and democracy” to use the force of the state to prevent a small number of law-abiding women from wearing an item of clothing they regard as part of their religious observance, and to arrest them on the streets if they persist in exercising their conscience in a way that harms nobody?'

Comments

Add New