With Pauline Hanson sparking renewed debate over the notion of banning face-covering Islamic garb like the burqa, the most obvious question is: why not?
After all, such things are completely at odds with Australian culture. Even in the olden days when ladies never went into town without their gloves, and gentlemen all wore hats, the sight of a woman clad head to toe in an all-obscuring, suffocating tent would have been just as confronting as it obviously is to those in the Senate chamber in 2025.
The burqa is, as Brendan O’Neill puts it, “fashion as fuck-you, where the aim is to appear as ostentatiously non-Western as possible”. It’s an ostentatious public statement of allegiance, not to the Western, secular nation-state, ruled by man’s laws, but the Muslim ummah, ruled by Allah. Its Muslims make a clear and unambiguous statement: we are not you.
Even worse than that, it’s a direct assault on one of modernity’s most dearly held beliefs: the emancipation of women. Mealy mouthed Islamophile apologists bleat that Muslim women ‘choose’ to wear their suffocating oppression tents. Just ask them.
Which is, in fact, just what Daily Mail Australia did. The responses were quite something.
Muslim women wearing the burqa said they can’t talk about their decision to wear it because their husbands won’t let them.
Tell us again, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, that Islam is ‘like, the most feminist religion’. We could all do with a good laugh.
It’s a strange sort of ‘feminism’ where women can’t speak for fear of copping a beating. (Religiously sanctioned, of course: just ask Muslim preachers.)
When approached by Daily Mail Australia, five women confessed their husbands would not like them speaking about it.
‘I would love to but my husband won’t let me,’ one woman told Daily Mail Australia, while three others replied with ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. My husband won’t like that’, ‘No, I would need to speak to my husband about it,’ and, ‘My husband doesn’t want me speaking about it, sorry.’
A fifth woman refused to speak to Daily Mail Australia and quickly walked away when asked about her burqa.
An acid attack just ruins your whole day, after all.
Data obtained by the Acid Survivors Trust International (ASTI) via a freedom of information request estimates that in England and Wales there were 941 attacks in 2017, falling steadily over the next few years to 427 in 2021. However, this has since gone up again, with 710 attacks reported in 2022 (an increase of 70 per cent).
These attacks are widely correlated with Muslim communities in the West, and nearly endemic in Islamic countries like Pakistan. Pakistani plastic surgeon Dr Bilal Saeed says he treats hundreds of women who’ve had acid thrown in their faces, usually by men in their own families.
He admits to being depressed by his work.
“On average we do multiple surgical and cosmetic procedures on these patients,” he said. “But whatever we do, we are not getting their smile back.”
Many commit suicide, according to Dr Saeed, in spite of his best efforts.
Why are Muslim men doing this? In Iraq, since the fall of the secular Arab socialist Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein, acid attacks have suddenly become commonplace. According to senior police investigator in Baghdad, Maj Abbas Dilemi, the perpetrators “cannot accept Iraqi women wearing Western clothes and walking without veils, alleging that it’s a prohibition by God”.
“Our country is a Muslim country and women should respect this by wearing veils and long cloaks. I’m against the use of acid against them but something should be done to force them into wearing the clothes,” Sheik Hussein Abbas, a radical Shi'ite leader in the capital, said.
When the ‘choice’ is between being murdered or disfigured for life for ‘immodesty’, or wearing a suffocating tent, is it a ‘choice’ at all?
