Burqa ban call row continues
IT wasn’t a Muslim woman with just her eyes showing through her burqa who last month robbed the small community bank two blocks from us.
In fact, I haven’t yet heard of a single bank anywhere in this country that’s yet been stuck up by a Muslim woman who walked in hiding a pistol beneath her veil.
Have you?
But somehow a Queensland retail lobby group has developed such a fear of pistol-packin’ Muslim mommas that it’s now demanding a ban on full-face burqas, as well as hoodies, in banks and shops.
And even more surprising was that almost 9000 of the 10,000 responses to the Herald Sun’s online and telephone poll backed the burqa ban.
Has there been an epidemic of hold-ups by women in burqas that everyone but me has noticed?
Or are people just seizing on any excuse to ban a kind of clothing they don’t like for other reasons entirely?
OK, the full-blown burqa can be confronting for many people for all sorts of reasons.
I certainly don’t like them and am glad I’ve only seen a few on the streets of Melbourne.
Most Muslim women here wear the simple hijab, a head scarf and loose clothing but with their face in full view.
I hardly even notice a woman in a hijab head scarf any more, but the sight of a woman covering her whole body and face in a burqa still makes me shudder.
Yes, I know it’s supposed to be the women’s choice and it’s seen as an act of worship and all that.
But I just can’t see it as anything other than oppressive.
Can people seriously think women’s bodies are so powerful that they have to be shielded from weak-minded men?
And that not even their eyes can be seen?
The sight of a burqa also conjures up everything else I dislike about the more archaic aspects of the Muslim religion, like honour killings, genital mutilation and girls’ schools being closed, as they have been again this month in Pakistan.
The sight of a woman in a burqa takes me straight back inside the pages of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s wonderful autobiography Infidel, where women were the lowest form of life with no rights at all.
Still, I want to live in a society where people can be free to wear what they want and where people’s different religious beliefs are respected.
And if that means I have to put up with the sight of the occasional burqa, then that’s a small price to pay.
It’s a hard thing to stomach but I actually agree for once with acquitted terror suspect Jack Thomas, who said forcing Muslim women to remove at least the veil of their burqas in shops would be discriminatory and unfair.
Although I do understand why retailers want to see their customers walk in with faces uncovered
Even now, the tellers of our local bank sure are jumpy.
As you walk in, all the staff, including the boss sitting way at the back, looks up sharply to check whether they’ve got business or trouble.
Of course, once they see it’s just me they relax.
But if I were draped head to foot in metres of black cotton, with just my eyes on show, I’d forgive them for nervously wondering what I might be hiding.
It’s such a shame what some stuff-you thug with a gun has done to the trust we like to show each other.
And even more shameful is that such thugs are now making us distrustful of even the guiltless.
But can’t we wait until armed robbers start dressing in burqas before we decide to ban them?
Until then, we’re all freaking out about a danger that exists purely in our imagination.
0 Responses to “Burqa ban call row continues”