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Feminists for the burka
Since VFR’s earliest days I have commented on feminists’ remarkable failure to oppose the influx and empowerment in our society of a religion, Islam, that grossly oppresses women. The explanation, I said, is that feminists, and the left generally, are not really motivated by their expressed desire for equality, but by the desire to destroy Western society, and therefore they are favorably disposed toward a religion which also seeks the destruction of our society. Now feminists in Canada have gone beyond non-opposition to the Islamic treatment of women and are actively defending it. The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) has intervened in a court case on behalf of a Muslim woman who insists on wearing the burka and concealing her face when testifying in court against the men she accuses of raping her. For the woman to be required to show her face while giving testimony like every other citizen of Canada, argues LEAF, would be an act of discrimination against her: “In this case, the sexual assault complainant is a woman of colour from a stigmatized racial/religious minority. The value of her demeanour evidence, already deeply suspect as a sexual assault complainant, is thrown into further question by the inevitable influence of prejudices (whether overt or hidden) relating to these additional markers of discrimination.” In other words, Canada, the premier multicultural society in the world, a society so multicultural that it has no identity except multiculturalism, is in reality so prejudiced against nonwhite women that their faces must be hidden from a jury to protect them from the jurors’ anti-woman, anti-white prejudices! “By this logic,” writes Tasha Kheiriddin in the National Post, “why should any woman have to testify in person in a rape case, particularly if she isn’t white or Christian? Why not put all women in a niqab so that their demeanour won’t be held against them in court? I said above that feminists and leftists don’t believe in the equality and non-discrimination they say they believe in, but in destroying the West. That needs to be qualified. Feminists and leftists do believe in non-discrimination and equality. But they believe that discrimination and inequality are so deeply embedded in the West (as shown by LEAF’s statement) that the only way to overcome them is for the West itself to be destroyed.
(For more on the type of liberals whose demands for equality are so radical that they can only be satisfied by toppling our society, see my discussion of Gregory Cursis’s essay, “The Essential Liberal,” which appears near the end of this entry.) Email entry |