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Once again, Pauline Hanson has provoked shock and outrage among the elites. In so doing, she has not only exposed the blatant hypocrisy of these pearl-clutching ninnies, but lit up her profile among ordinary Australians. I’d be very surprised not to see One Nation’s numbers rise to at least 18 per cent in the next round of polling, maybe even break the 20 per cent barrier.
What did she do to outrage the chatterers, this time?
Pauline Hanson has been suspended from the Senate after wearing a black burka into the chamber, a repeat of her stunt from more than seven years ago, prompting a swift rebuke from the Senate leaders of both major parties.
And exposing their rampaging hypocrisy for all to see, yet again.
As I wrote last time Hanson wore a burqa into the Senate, it was immediately obvious that the other senators, the elite of both left and right in Australia, found the sight of someone dressed in fully obscuring Muslim clothing to be confronting, even shocking.
Yet, as elsewhere in the West, the elites are constantly hectoring ordinary Australians that they have nothing to fear from the increasingly visible intrusion of Islam into daily life. Ordinary people are scolded that they are ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ for being uncomfortable with the sight of covered Muslim women. When cartoonist Larry Pickering spoke at a private function about such discomfort, he was widely villified by the media-political class.
Hanson’s stunts also expose another yawing gap between the media-political elite and ordinary Australians. Where the elite are outraged, polling shows 56 per cent of Australians backed her call for banning the burqa. Of those, nearly 44 per cent “strongly supported” a ban. Just 30 per cent opposed. Another poll showed that 49 per cent back One Nation’s policy of banning Muslim immigration.
Hanson has also, again, exposed yet more glaring hypocrisy from the elites.
Senator Hanson was ordered to remove the burka or risk being suspended from the Senate for the rest of sitting after Senator Wong moved to have her removed. The One Nation Leader refused to leave the chamber, before the Senate sitting was suspended.
Yet, it’s OK for Fatima Payman and the Greens to wear keffiyehs, a symbol of anti-Semitic terrorism, in the Senate? And chant the anti-Semitic genocide slogan, “From the River to the Sea”? It was OK for the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young to wave a dead fish around the Senate chamber? (At least it covered the smell, I suppose.)
Members of the Greens and the crossbench were furious, with independent senator Lidia Thorpe heard telling the chamber “someone should rip her head off”.
No censure of Thorpe for either this blatant incitement to violence against a senator – no more than she was censured for threatening terrorism against the parliament.
If these people didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any.
And if they actually knew anything about the Constitution they’re pledged to serve, they’d be dangerous.
Fatima Payman said: “She is disrespecting a faith, she is disrespecting the Muslims out there, Muslim Australians. It is absolutely unconstitutional. This needs to be dealt with before we proceed.”
Nothing in the Constitution says we’re not allowed to disrespect a religion. But then, the Constitution forbids dual citizens from being MPs: yet, here’s Payman, a dual citizen of Afghanistan, allowed to keep her seat.
If these people didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any.
Senator Hanson said she was denied the right to move the bill, which prompted her to leave the chamber, put the burka on, and come back wearing it.
“Straight away they’ve denied me the right to ban the burka ... so I thought, well, if you won’t let me ban the burka, then I’m going to wear it,” she said.
“Well, didn’t that upset them.
“They don’t want me to wear the burka. They don’t want to ban it but they don’t want me to wear it.
“They’re a bunch of hypocrites.”
Never a truer word was spoken.
She said in a statement her proposals would bring Australia in line with European countries like Italy and France, and were necessary to defend the rights of women.
“Burqas not only hide the identities of the women who are often forced to wear them. They are a mechanism for these women to be controlled by men from their families or religion, to remind them they are considered property or chattels rather than individuals with rights, freedom and agency. This is completely incompatible with Australian culture, law and values, and basic women’s rights.
“A ban on burkas and similar Islamic garb which hides people’s identity is all the more urgent as the Albanese government continues to repatriate extremists who joined Islamic State and offer refuge to Gazans who support the terrorist group Hamas.”
Worse, they’re an open statement of complete disdain for Western values. A burqa is a big, black middle-finger to everything the West holds dear.
They are, as Brendan O’Neill says, “fashion as fuck you, where the aim is to appear as ostentatiously non-Western as possible”. In this way, hijab in all degrees, from headscarf to burqa, can be seen as a public statement of allegiance, not to the Western, secular nation-state, ruled by man’s laws, but the Muslim ummah, ruled by Allah.
This is what Hanson and her supporters instinctively grasp and the raging political and media elite refuse to see. The progressive left can congratulate itself for its sophisticated dedication to ‘inclusion’ and multiculturalism, but when Muslims don the hijab, they are making a clear and visible statement: we are not you.
