by Mark Steyn
But Britain’s biggest Barbie fan, Angela Ellis, was thrilled. “Bring it on, Burqa Barbie,” she said. “I think this is a great idea. I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from, they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.”
Well, Barbie is fifty. And at an age when Katie Cougar—er, Couric—America’s all-time champion network news-ratings limbo-dancer, is being photographed ill-advisedly doing the lambada at the Christmas office party, there is perhaps something to be said for belatedly mothballing your seventy-six-inch plastic bust. Or as the blogger Laura Rosen Cohen put it: “Great news: that bitch Barbie has finally reverted.” “And there’s no need for expensive accessories like books or cars or a life,” added Tim Blair of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, “because Barbie in a Bag isn’t allowed to leave her home unless accompanied by a male relative (Mullah Ken, sold separately).”
Mullah Ken? I’m not so sure about that. Given the longtime rumors, Ken’ll be lucky not to find himself crushed under one of those walls the Taliban put up for their sodomite-rehabilitation program. You’ll be glad to know the dolls are anatomically accurate: Burqa Barbie has no clitoris, and, just like Mohamed Atta on the morning of September 11, Ken’s genital area is fully depilated.
But we mean-spirited types are in the minority. The other day, I was watching, as one does, a German lingerie ad, for Liaison Dangereuse. It began with a naked woman—bit blurry and soft-focus, but you could see she had her hair in a towel and everything else in nothing at all, and there were definite glimpses of shapely bottom, the swell of her bosom, and whatnot. All very Continental.
She applies her lipstick, sashays into her dressing room wiggling aforementioned posterior, hooks her brassiere, rolls up her seamed stockings, slips into her stilettos, and then—with one final toss of her glossy luxuriant hair—pulls on her burqa and steps out the door. Tag line: “Sexiness for Everyone. Everywhere.”
Very clever. The agency is Glow of Berlin. Might win them an award. Yet the superficial cool and the O. Henry switcheroo at the tail seem less cutting-edge state-of-the-art than sad and desperate wishful thinking. For one thing, if the comely young lady were truly a believing Muslim as opposed to a jobbing infidel thespian, her underdressed acting gig would earn her death threats, if she were lucky, and, if she weren’t, actual death.
Still, Burqa Barbie and Fatima’s Secret are minor and peripheral. What about the so-called most powerful man in the world? “The U.S. Government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it,” President Obama told his audience in Cairo earlier this year. “I reject the view of some in the west that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”
My oh my, he’s a profile in courage, isn’t he? It’s true that there have been occasional frictions over, say, the refusal of Muslim women to reveal their faces for their driver’s licenses—Sultaana Freeman, for example, sued the state of Florida over that “right.” But the real issue in the western world is “the right of women and girls” not “to wear the hijab.” A couple of weeks ago in Arizona, a young woman called Noor Almaleki was fatally run over by her father in his Jeep Cherokee for becoming “too westernized.” If there were a Matthew Shepard–style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American “honor killings”), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams. When it comes to real hate crimes, as opposed to his entirely imaginary epidemic, the President of the United States has smaller cojones than Ken.
If you eschew the Grand Cherokee in favor of the Toronto subway, you might have noticed that the poster girl for the latest “social justice” campaign is a Muslim woman. “Drop Fees for a Poverty-Free Ontario” is the ringing cry, and next to it is a hijab-clad lady speaking up and speaking out. It’s something to do with the cost of post-secondary education, which, like everything else in Canada, is supposed to be “free.” The image is a curious choice as an emblem for educational access: after all, one of the most easily discernible features of societies that adopt Islamic dress is how ignorant they are. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls were forbidden by law to attend school—not just fritter-away-half-a-decade-on-Ontario-taxpayers “post-secondary” education, but kindergarten and grade one. In Pakistan, 60 percent of women are illiterate. According to the UN’s 2002 Arab Development Report, half of all women in the Arab world cannot read. And even in Canada, the ability of the woman on the subway poster to access that post-secondary education depends not on the “fees” but on her father, or, if she’s already been married off to her sixteen-year-old cousin back in Mirpur, her husband. The Saskatchewan Internet maestro Kate McMillan summed up the poster thus: “Subjugation of women—it’s the new normal.”
“Traditional Islamic dress” is not so “traditional.” Talk to any educated Muslim woman who attended university in the Fifties, Sixties, or Seventies—back when they assumed history was moving their way and a covered woman was merely a local variant of the Russian babushka, something old and wizened you saw in upcountry villages. Now you see them in the heart of the metropolis—and I don’t mean Beirut or Abu Dhabi so much as Paris and Brussels. It’s very strange to be able to walk around, say, Zarqa, hometown of the late “insurgent” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and look 90 percent of the women in the eye, and even be rewarded with a friendly smile every so often, and then to fly on to London and be confronted by one masked face after another while strolling down Whitechapel Road in the East End. The burqa, the niqab, and the hijab are not fashion statements but explicitly political ones, and what they symbolize in a western context is self-segregation.
That “Drop Fees” campaign would never dream of dressing up its poster gal as June Cleaver, Donna Reed, or any other outmoded sitcom mom in twin-set and pearls. Golly, that would send all sorts of disturbing signals to today’s liberated females, wouldn’t it? What signal is Barbie’s burqa sending? That, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, women were forbidden by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces? Hey, there’s a positive message for young girls.
Perhaps white liberal progressives figure the new patriarchy can be contained to the likes of Noor Almaleki, but I doubt it. I’ve mentioned previously a Euro-pal of mine, non-Muslim, who’s taken to covering herself in certain quartiers of an evening in order to avoid harassment by “youths.” She does exactly what that German lingerie lass does—and with the merest correction to the sign-off:
“Subjugation for Every Woman. Everywhere.”
HOW UNCLEAN WAS MY VALLEY
SteynOnline, July 13, 2011
ON SATURDAY, The Toronto Star’s education section carried a photograph showing a typical Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School. That’s not a private academy, it’s a public school funded by Toronto taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what’s going on is a prayer service.
Oh, relax, it’s not Anglican or anything improper like that; it’s Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don’t worry, it’s just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams’ disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off to the local mosque, and then they’d be late for Lesbian History class or whatever subject is scheduled for Friday afternoon.
The picture is taken from the back of the cafeteria, and shows two sets of bottoms in the air from those kneeling at prayer, and a third group of backs, sitting on the floor. In the distance, way up in the expensive seats, are the boys. They’re male, so they get to sit up front at prayers. Behind them are the girls. They’re female, so they have to sit behind the boys because they’re second-class citizens—not in the whole of Canada, not formally, not yet, but i
n the cafeteria of a middle school run by the Toronto District School Board they most certainly are.
And the third row? The ones with their backs to us in the foreground of the picture? Well, let the Star’s caption writer explain: “At Valley Park Middle School, Muslim students participate in the Friday prayer service. Menstruating girls, at the very back, do not take part.”
Oh. As the blogger Kathy Shaidle says, “Yep, that’s part of the caption of the Toronto Star photo. Yes, the country is Canada and the year is 2011.”
Just so. Not some exotic photojournalism essay from an upcountry village in Krappistan. But a typical Friday at a middle school in the largest city in Canada. I forget which brand of tampon used to advertise itself with the pitch “Now with new [whatever] you can go horse-riding, water-skiing, ballet dancing, whatever you want to do,” but perhaps they can just add the tag: “But not participate in Friday prayers at an Ontario public school.”
Some Canadians will look at this picture and react as Miss Shaidle did, or Tasha Kheiriddin in The National Post:
Is this the Middle Ages? Have I stumbled into a time warp, where “unclean” women must be prevented from “defiling” other persons? It’s bad enough that the girls at Valley Park have to enter the cafeteria from the back, while the boys enter from the front, but does the entire school have the right to know they are menstruating?
But a lot of Canadians will glance at the picture and think, “Aw, diversity, ain’t it a beautiful thing?”—no different from the Sikh Mountie in Prince William’s escort. And even if they read the caption and get to the bit about a Toronto public school separating menstruating girls from the rest of the student body and feel their multiculti pieties wobbling just a bit, they can no longer quite articulate on what basis they’re supposed to object to it. Indeed, thanks to the likes of Ontario “Human Rights” Commission chief commissar Barbara Hall, the very words in which they might object to it have been all but criminalized.
Islam understands the reality of Commissar Hall’s “social justice”: You give ’em an inch, and they’ll take the rest. Following a 1988 cease-and-desist court judgment against the Lord’s Prayer in public school, the Ontario Education Act forbids “any person to conduct religious exercises or to provide instruction that includes religious indoctrination in a particular religion or religious belief in a school.” That seems clear enough. If somebody at Valley Park stood up in the cafeteria and started in with “Our Father, which art in Heaven,” the full weight of the school board would come crashing down on them. Fortunately, Valley Park is 80 to 90 percent Muslim, so there are no takers for the Lord’s Prayer. And, when it comes to the prayers they do want to say, the local Islamic enforcers go ahead secure in the knowledge that the diversity pansies aren’t going to do a thing about it.
Nobody would know a thing about the “mosqueteria” story were it not for the blogger Blazing Cat Fur, whom I was honored to say a word for in Ottawa a few months back. He broke this story and then saw it get picked up without credit by the Toronto media. He does that a lot. Currently, he’s featuring the thoughts of Jawed Anwar, editor of The Muslim, a publication for Greater Toronto Area Muslims, and of Dr. Bilal Philips, a “Canadian religious scholar” who was born in Jamaica but grew up in Toronto and has many prestigious degrees not only from Saudi Arabia but also from the University of Wales, where he completed a Ph.D. in “Islamic Theology.” Dr. Philips is in favor of death for homosexuals, and, as one Canadian to another, Mr. Anwar was anxious to explain to his readers that that’s nothing to get alarmed about:
Although, there is no clear-cut verse in Qur’an that categorically suggests killing of homosexuals, sayings of Prophet Muhammad suggests three types of sentences, and among that one is death. Bilal Philips is suggesting, based on his opinion on the Qur’anic/Prophetic principles of society. He is not advising the Islamic judiciary to kill any gay person they found, but what he is “suggesting” is judicial punishment of death sentence for those who confess or are seen “performing homosexual acts” by “four reliable witnesses without any doubt.”
The essence of Islamic laws is to protect the life of human beings. And it happens that sometimes killing of a person can save thousands and sometimes millions of lives. The Islamic judiciary can punish a person with death sentence to save others’ lives.
Okay, great, thanks. Glad you cleared that up. Two eminent “Canadian” Muslims are openly discussing the conditions under which homosexuals should be executed—and doing so in the cheerful knowledge that Commissar Hall, so determined to slap down my “Islamophobia,” isn’t going to do a thing about their “homophobia.”
Imagine if you’re a soi-disant moderate Muslim, genuinely so. You came to Canada because Yemen’s a dump, and you don’t want to waste your life there. And your daughter loves it, and wants to be Canadian, and be just like the other girls in her street. And then she goes to Valley Park Middle School: What if she doesn’t feel it’s a religious obligation to attend Friday prayers (as some Muslims argue)? Think there’s much chance of being able to opt out easily at Valley Park? What if she wants to dress as she wishes to rather than as the Wahhabi/Salafist imam orders? What if she doesn’t want to tell the creepy perve mullah whether she’s menstruating or not? What, in other words, is her chance of being able to attend Valley Park as a regular Canadian schoolgirl?
I’ve had cause to mention before Phyllis Chesler’s photographs of Cairo University’s evolving dress code over the last half-century. In 1978, the female students in Cairo looked little different from the female students at the University of Toronto, or Kingston. Now the schoolgirls of Toronto look no different from Cairo, where today the female students are all covered. Ms. Chesler’s pictures are a story of transformation, but that transformation is not confined to the Middle East.
“Diversity” is where nations go to die. If local Mennonites or Amish were segregating the sexes and making them enter by different doors for religious services in a Toronto grade-school cafeteria, Canadian feminists would howl them down in outrage. But when Muslims do it they fall as silent as their body-bagged sisters in Kandahar. If you’re wondering how Valley Park’s catchment district got to be 80 to 90 percent Muslim in nothing flat, well, Islam is currently the biggest supplier of new Canadians, as it is of new Britons and new Europeans. Not many western statistics agencies keep tabs on religion, but the Vienna Institute of Demography, for example, calculates that by 2050 a majority of Austrians under fifteen will be Muslim. 2050 isn’t that far away. It’s as far from today as 2011 is from 1972: The future shows up faster than you think.
A world that becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else: First it’s Jews, already abandoning France. Then it’s homosexuals, already under siege from gay-bashing in Amsterdam, “the most tolerant city in Europe.” Then it’s uncovered women, already targeted for rape in Oslo and other Continental cities. And, if you don’t any longer have any Jews or (officially) any gays or (increasingly) uncovered women, there are always just Christians in general, from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan.
More space for Islam means less space for everything else, and in the end less space for you.
Jawed Anwar is not Canadian. Dr. Bilal Philips is not Canadian. The men who separate boys from girls and menstruating girls from non-menstruating girls every Friday at Valley Park Middle School are not Canadian. Perhaps, were we a different kind of society, they would over time become Canadian. But, because they don’t have to, they won’t. Because they look at the witless “Pride” parade and the multiculti blather and the diversity commissars handing each other Mutual Backslap Awards all year long, and Jawed and Bilal understand that they’re what comes after Canada. This year it’s maybe just one mosqueteria. Next year, two or three more. Half a decade on, who knows? South of the border? The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, for reasons that are unclear, already has a taxpayer-funded “Muslim Community Affairs Unit.” But don’t worry, your small town in Minnesota will be getting one soon enough. As one Salaf
ist lady told the woman from The New York Times, demonstrating how she gradually adopted full-face covering: “It just takes time. . . . You get used to it.”
Look at that picture from Valley Park: Toronto’s already used to it.
X
MYSTIC CHORDS
SOUNDS OF THE RUDE WORLD
Steyn’s Song of the Week, January 19, 2014
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO, living in a cheap hotel on the Bowery in New York’s Lower East Side, a young man laid low by a fever tried to rise from his sick bed. He slipped and fell against the wash basin, shattering it and thereby gashing his throat and gouging his head. It was some time before he was found and taken to the Welfare Island hospital, the same hospital to which Jerome Kern (composer of “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Ol’ Man River,” and many more) would be taken when he collapsed on a New York street in 1945 with no identification on him. And like Kern all those decades later, Stephen Foster died there—on January 13, 1864, three days after his fall. He was only thirty-seven and had in his pocket just a little more than his years in pennies: thirty-eight cents.
Foster’s name isn’t as famous today as it was in, say, the mid-twentieth century, but his songs are still known: “Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,” “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”—or as Bugs Bunny liked to sing, “I dream of Jeanie—she’s a light brown hare.” Two Stephen Foster compositions are official state songs—“My Old Kentucky Home,” and, in Florida, “The Old Folks at Home (Swanee River).” Twenty-first-century Americans know far more songs by Stephen Foster than they do by any American songwriter before Irving Berlin. As for Berlin, Ann Ronell (composer of “Willow, Weep for Me” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”) worked for his publishing house as a young woman and told me years later of being in Berlin’s private office and seeing all his Foster books and memorabilia. “Mr. Berlin,” his copyist informed Ann, “considers himself the reincarnation of Stephen Foster.” But Berlin died at 101 owning and enforcing all his copyrights (from “White Christmas” down) and with a lot more than thirty-eight cents in his pocket.
