I would not go to such a place

Exactly. You wouldn’t go to a place where the law forbade women from dressing in accordance with your own standards of modesty. Lots of Muslims feel the same way. So, perhaps you can understand why passing a law that prohibits women from dressing in accordance with Muslim standards of modesty might be interpreted to mean: Muslims are not welcome here.

Obviously you know nothing about European law and somehow without evidence you seem to believe that Muslims in general actually care about defending the burqa to the breaking point.

Fact (please read)

“While the Koran and the hadith, the collected commentaries on Muhammed’s life, require Muslims to dress modestly in public, there is, however, no mention of the burqa in these sacred texts. The requirement for modest dress by women, called hijab from the Arabic word for “curtain” or “cover,” is interpreted in diverse ways across the Muslim world, from chadris to no head covering at all.”

Ad Nauseam: Noone wants to ban modest dresses or headscarves. Religious freedom is guaranteed. Freedom to bizarre and humiliating practices even if loosely based on a religion is not guaranteed.The burqa is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience and debasement.

The misplaced idealism is on your side that you think that claiming religious freedom will give you a free pass to do anything. We have secular states for a reason and that reason is to forbid fundamentalists of all colors to deprive us of hard earned freedom.

Many where I live (which happens to be one of the most secular countries in the world). Including, nuns and priests, those in mourning. Ladies wearing veils on their hats, I meet those every week during summer. Jews wear them. Atheists wear them.

There is no rational argument on banning veils, ergo the very people arguing the ban of veils because its relation to something bad are irrational fearmongers.

Just don’t admit you have any or you’re screwed.

It’s one thing to admit to an irrational belief, it’s another thing entirely to justify it.

Amen! That may be the single sanest statement that has been made in a BB comment this month. As far as I’m concerned, you win the thread.

I do not want to impose nothing on muslim women, i want to ban an instrument of hate.

You see the burqa as an “instrument of hate” against women. Many Muslims, including many Muslim women, say it is not. Many Muslims see your proposed burqa ban as an “instrument of hate” against Muslims. You say it is not. Who am I to believe? Why should I take your word for it and not theirs? You haven’t exactly proven your case beyond a reasonable doubt. You have asserted that YOU see the burqa as an instrument of hate, and I believe that you are sincere in that opinion. But sincerity alone isn’t sufficient to transform a subjective opinion into an objective fact. You can assert that the burqa is an instrument of hate as much as you wish; but that still doesn’t prove the truth of that assertion. You have pointed out that many other people share your opinion of the burqa — perhaps even the majority of people in the Western world. But numbers alone do not make an opinion true. The fact that a majority of non-Muslim Westerners see the burqa as oppressive to women does not make it so. In a democracy, policy may be established by majority vote; but truth cannot be. If you are basing your argument in favor of a burqa ban on the claim that the burqa is an “instrument of hate”, you’d better be able to prove the truth of that claim. Thus far, you’ve proved nothing beyond the fact that many non-Muslim Westerners happen to share your opinion. That’s not enough.

But it is not a choice and in that case civil society must step in and protect those women. If that were the case do you agree with me?

If you could actually prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, using evidence that would stand up in a court of law (and not merely assertions or statements of opinion), that a woman wearing a burqa has not freely chosen to do so, I would gladly support state action to free her from her oppressor — in fact, to punish her oppressor. But I would not support a blanket ban on the burqa simply because some people find it hateful.

Obviously, if a woman is required by law to wear a burqa (as in Afghanistan when it was controlled by the Taliban), she is not free to choose. Likewise, if a woman is intimidated into veiling her face by the community she lives in (as in some parts of the Muslim world), she is not free to choose. But if she is living in a free society where she has the legal right to wear whatever she wants, then I have to assume that she DOES wear whatever she wants, unless you can prove otherwise. The mere fact that she’s wearing something that I don’t approve of — or that the majority of the people in my country don’t approve of — is no evidence that she has not freely chosen to wear it. In an oppressive society, we can assume that people are being oppressed. But in a free society, we shouldn’t assume that people are being oppressed unless we have hard evidence to prove it. The mere fact that a woman is wearing a burqa is not hard evidence that she is being oppressed, unless you make the assumption that the burqa itself is inherently oppressive — and that would be begging the question.

Where there is actual proof that a member of society is being oppressed, the state has the right and the responsibility to intervene to protect that member of society from oppression. But where there is no proof — where there is only opinion, even if it is the majority opinion — state intervention cannot be justified. As Brandeis put it, the people have “the right to be let alone” by their government, which he referred to as “the right most valued by civilized man.” In order to justify violating that most basic of rights, the government must be able to prove that its actions are absolutely necessary in order to protect members of society from actual harm by others — not merely hypothetical harm to some abstract concept such as “women’s rights”, but actual harm to specific individuals — and it must be able to defend its actions using hard evidence, not just opinion or speculation. Advocates of a “burqa ban” have done an excellent job of expressing their opinion that burqas are harmful to “women’s rights” in the abstract; but they haven’t been able to present one shred of hard evidence to prove that actual individuals living in free, Western societies have been harmed in any way as a direct result of people having the freedom to wear a burqa. If there’s evidence of actual harm, then present the evidence — not just your opinion, or expert opinion, or majority opinion; but genuine, hard evidence that would hold up in a court of law. If that evidence existed, I don’t think we’d even be having this debate.

President Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II, 1982. Queen Elizabeth wearing a veil.

Also it is true that certain kinds of behavior indeed are not welcome, what’s so strange or abhorrent about that? Do you advocate that everyone is welcome regardless of his\her respect of the local law? Do we have a moral obligation to give free pass to the Taliban for example? Or the Freedomites so you do not accuse me of Islamophobia?

No not at all, even though I’d gladly let my wife show off her twins if I get a look at all other women’s!

My point was about how it might be disturbing to the woman and you turned it right into the Male Gaze. That pretty much sums up the problem.

I am an MD. I did 4 months of my military service on an uninhabited island where traffickers unloaded hoards of desperates mainly afgans and pakistanis. I saw some of them drown. I tried my best to help. I voted for the change in immigration and naturalization laws and in favor of giving second generation immigrants voting rights. I protested against the ban of a mosque in Athens. And against the abomination of a law that leaves kids of illegal immigrants without a homeland even if they are 3rd generation here (unless they play soccer of course). I donated to the freedom flotilla. I refused to turn in illegals that came to the hospital and protested with the other doctors when they tried to make it obligatory to call the cops if an illegal presents himself in the ER.

So i do not view myself as a bigot. I believe that i did and do my part to be hospital and civil. I want immigrants to assimilate and feel at home and be given all the rights we enjoy. I don’t believe that paying lip service to the lowest denominator helps. And i don’t want my caring for humans being mistaken for cowardice or fear of consequences. I will draw mohamed and use the name of the lord in vain as much as i please.

If that magically transforms me in a Nazi bigot so be it.

In any case, the way for Muslims to show their observance of their religion just isn’t for you to decide. It’s their choice, not yours.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/25/italy-mayor-miniskirts-ban

..so perhaps we shall all meet in the middle on these questions, so to speak.

A lot of people are vaguely suspicious of muslims in airport settings. Is that really irrational, given recent statistics regarding muslims trying to blow up airplanes?

Europol (an umbrella group for police cooperation across Europe) recently released statistics on terrorist acts in Europe for 2009. Of the several hundred that occurred most were acts of ethnic groups such as Basque separatists and Irish nationalists, while most of what were left were simply hateful crimes by European groups such as neo-Nazis and racist bigots and one and one only was ascribed to Islamic religious extremeists or Arab nationalists (Arab nationalism is the motive of most of the acts people confuse with religious extremeism).

The statistics are, regarding Muslims and acts of terror that many, many more Muslims are killed, tortured and injured by foreign bombs and bullets than vice versa and if any attempt is made to rationalise hate from statistics then it makes much more sense for the Muslim to be fearful of apparent U.S citizens.

The truth of the matter is no single person is in any significant danger of attack and projecting fear of the unlikely on others is to diminish yourself and give in to fear.

The population of the U.S has been poorly served by leaders who would rather cowe their citizens with the threat of others to strengthern their own position and profit their friends.

And you people who would tell others what to do are doing a great disservice to people who wish to make their own choices.

If a woman doesn’t want to wear a veil she can make that choice by herself. She doesn’t need to have that choice imposed on her by any government.

On a related note, this morning I nearly threw up over my hotel breakfast when an American tourist walked in wearing a T-shirt that said; “Abu Graib K-9 Unit.” Seeing someone’s racist ugliness on display like that was deeply shocking. I’m hoping he’s back across the border, tucked away safely in his trailer park tonight.

The group from which the greatest threat of terrorist attack in the continental United States comes from is white caucasian male gun owners.

Notice how lately the neocon/teaparty sympathetic posts are popping up more and more? Places you hardly ever used to see them? That is not a coincidence. These people are paid to go on message boards and to call in to radio shows and repeat the propaganda over and over and over again. They hijack threads and clog the airwaves with the right wing message. And they’re whores, the lot of them. It is an evil thing to do, to undermine democracy and decency for money. Ugly.

And we have to call it when we see it. Because the bad guys are not satisfied with buying the media and the courts and everything else they can get their filthy mitts on, they want to buy the space of public discourse. They’ve won so much. They are very bold.

Call them out. Slap them down.

So why do you think the best course of action to further the liberation of women is to enact laws restricting what they can and can’t do, as opposed to what their oppressors can and can’t do to them?