RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here’s a case in point. A woman who identifies herself as a professor at a Chicago ^[1] university (it’s Northeastern Illinois) publishes this touching note in the New York (Muslim) Times today ^[1]. Gail Dreyfuss describes an “encounter” she had with a student who was wearing both hijab (a headscarf) and a pin which read “I am a Muslim.” I guess the student did not want anyone mistaking her for … a Buddhist or a Jew; perhaps the student did not think that westerners know that a wearing a tight “headscarf which framed her face” meant she was a Muslim.

Dreyfuss, a professor of Linguistics, asked her student if she had a “spare pin.” The student took off her own.  The professor “wore it all day and received only positive reactions from students and staff members.”

And that’s when she came up with her Great Idea. Dreyfuss writes: “It occurred to me that non-Muslim women might like to wear headscarves in solidarity with our Muslim sisters.… This might be one way to show them that we’re all in this together.”

Is Dreyfuss serious? Does she believe that Muslims are under the kind of siege that Jews were under during the Nazi regime and which prompted Danes to all wear the yellow star as a way of hiding endangered Danish Jews from Jew-hunters?

Clearly, she does.

Dreyfuss has drunk the kool-aid and believes that “Islamophobia ^[2]” really exists in America. This is not surprising since, for a long time now, but more and more intensely, the mainstream media has launched an all-out campaign to persuade people of this.

Well, Dreyfuss is a professor, she can read. I suggest she visit the FBI’s site ^[3] dedicated to hate crimes in America. There she will find that of the 1,732 victims ^[4] of religious hate crimes in 2008 in America, 66.1 percent were targeted because of anti-Jewish bias and 7.5% were targeted because of anti-Islamic bias.

Professor Dreyfuss: May I suggest that you start wearing a Jewish star to express solidarity with the most hated, most vilified, most unjustly demonized of all Americans: The Jews? Or, if you will, why not wear a kipah (skullcap, yarmulke)? Better yet, why not wear a Hasidic wig, covered by a scarf, and a sign saying “I am a Jew.”

I am sorry, I do not want to sound mean or bitter when I am actually disheartened, alarmed, by such liberal western support for clothing which is a visual symbol of women’s subordination ^[5]—to men, not to God; which is not a religious requirement; which so many feminists in the Islamic world have opposed; which so many contemporary Arab and Muslim states have also opposed in its more extreme form (the niqab, the burqa) for security reasons.

When I see women in the West wearing hijab today, I understand it is also a very political statement, sometimes a jihadic statement, a misguided return to seventh century “roots,” and sometimes, a response to what the Muslim girl or woman has been told about Western “Islamophobia.”

Sure, by now, even easygoing, ordinary Americans are waking up to the fact that 9/11 was a terrorist act perpetrated by Muslims, as were the shootings at Fort Hood, the Christmas Day attempted “underwear” bomber, and the failed Times Square bomber. Clearly, the professoriate refuses to accept these facts.