Mahvash Ali from The Project is 100% correct that the West Auckland Burkini incident is sexist but not for the reasons that she claims.
To set the scene let me share an incident that happened last night as we celebrated our daughter’s 21st birthday at a restaurant in Stanmore Bay.
“Oh my God Mum!” exclaimed our daughter as a black wraith glided past the window, “Did you see that?” It took a few seconds for my brain to register what I had just seen. Initially, it told me that someone in a Halloween costume dressed from head to toe in black had just walked past the window. The black fabric flared out as they whispered past like a floating dementor from the Harry Potter books.
My brain then registered that it was not Halloween and that what I had just seen was something as alien to Whangaparaoa as a dementor and just as frightening. The shock on my independent daughter’s beautiful face was echoed inside my heart. We had just witnessed a woman in extreme bondage. A woman relegated to the shadows, her identity erased, her world shrunk to the confines of black cloth forcing her to re breath stale air over and over again. Her vision of the world confined to a narrow eye slit where no peripheral vision was possible. In short, we had witnessed a female slave, walking behind her owner husband or father.
What we had witnessed was shocking and 100% sexist. It goes against everything that New Zealand holds dear. Seeing a fellow woman in such bondage is extremely upsetting and anyone who dares to call themselves a feminist has something seriously wrong with them if they can look at such horror and remain unmoved.
I wouldn’t be any more shocked if a woman in a ball and chain shuffled past the window as the effect was exactly the same.
So with that in mind, I turn to the so-called West Auckland Burkini incident that journalist Mahvash Ali has called sexist but for all the wrong reasons.
Lifeguards’ decision to remove a group of Muslim women from a west Auckland swimming pool was down to sexism, a journalist says.
A group of fully-clothed Muslim women were asked to leave the water at Henderson’s West Wave Pool at the weekend.
The Project’s Mahvash Ali told The AM Show the same thing would not have happened to a man.
Trust me Mahvash, the same thing would have happened to a man if he had tried to enter the pool fully-clothed as those women did but I suspect you already know that and are deliberately trying to avoid the elephant in the room. How clever of you to use the red herring of sexism to avoid addressing the oppressive and patriarchal culture that forces those women to dress like dementors.
“The issue is not about Muslims and non-Muslims, for me the issue is about being soft targets. It’s just easier to target a woman.
[…] An Auckland Council representative told Newshub the women weren’t kicked out for wearing Burkinis though, but because the clothing they chose to cover up with was unsafe.
“Some of the clothes the women wore were deemed to be activewear by our lifeguards and they advised the customers according to our guidelines.
Newshub
Actually Mahvash the issue is about an alien culture that treats women like pieces of meat that have to be covered up to keep the flies away. It is about an oppressive patriarchy that makes women invisible and sees them as second class citizens. It is about a culture that you yourself are a visible part of.
That sexism, however, is just too tough for someone like Mahvash to tackle because just like these invisible women she is too scared to stand up for equality and freedom. She wants us to beleive that it is their choice to remain in bondage just as it is her choice to be an apologist for the Islamic patriarchy. It is her job as a Muslim journalist to whitewash the unpalatable and to distract the public by claiming that enforcing the rules fairly is the real outrage.
