BRUCE BAWER: FEMINIST HIJAB SOLIDARITY?
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/feminist-hijab-solidarity/print/
Europe is awash in dhimmitude, but Sweden is a case unto itself. There’s something desperate and demented about the levels of dhimmitude on display in Ikea-land. In no other European country, moreover, is there so little pushback in the media.
As I wrote just yesterday, Sweden has the highest percentage of rapes in the Western world. And the problem is getting steadily worse. Given the progressive Swedish establishment’s fondness for earnest rhetoric about women’s rights, you might think this rape crisis would be a subject of deep concern in the nation’s media. But no – it’s a non-topic. It’s unmentionable. And for one reason: because everyone understands that the ever-increasing incidence of Swedish rapes is directly related to the ever-increasing number of Swedish Muslims. And in Sweden, you can’t talk critically about Islam. You just can’t – not publicly, anyway. When the subject is Islam, nothing is permitted other than the usual mindless multicultural mantras.
I’m deeply aware of all this. Even so, I was taken aback by one of the big news stories out of Sweden this week.
It started when a pregnant Muslim woman (one report put her age at 20; another identified her as a mother of three) claimed that she’d been attacked late Friday night. She was alone in a parking structure in the Stockholm suburb of Farsta, she said, when a man walked over to her, ripped off her hijab, and banged her head into a parked car, making her dizzy. He also growled something to the effect that people like her “don’t belong here.”
Now, if this actually happened, it’s repugnant. But there’s no evidence that it did happen – no eyewitnesses, no surveillance video – and it’s been suggested (although not, of course, in the Swedish media) that the woman’s story could be entirely bogus. In any case, it’s a man-bites-dog tale if there ever was one: Sweden is overrun with Muslim men who rape infidel women, not with infidels who pull headscarves off Muslim women.
Yet when the woman went public with her account, Swedish derangement syndrome kicked in – big time. On Sunday, Aftonbladet ran an op-ed signed by five persons: Bilan Osman, identified as an “anti-racist commentator”; Fatima Doubakil of the Muslim Human Rights Committee; Foujan Rouzbeh, an “asylum rights activist”; Nabila Abdul Fattah, “commentator”; and Nachla Libre, “poet.”
The five authors asserted that “the woman in Farsta isn’t the only one who has been attacked in this way.” Many Muslim women, they maintained, have been subjected to similar mistreatment by “white Swedish men…on buses, in stores, and at restaurants.” The authors painted a picture of a country filled with white people who “harass, degrade, intimidate, and abuse others in public places because of their religious attire.” And they argued that such offenses have become increasingly common because – and, yes, they actually wrote the following – “Islam and Muslims are described in the media and by political parties as a problem and a threat to Swedish democracy.”
Yes, Islam is a threat to Swedish democracy; but no, the Swedish media virtually never dare to admit this fact, or to say anything that might remotely hint at it. And the only political party that addresses this issue is the Swedish Democratic Party, whose members are not only routinely condemned in the media, in the harshest of terms, but have been repeatedly harassed, degraded, intimidated, and abused by the Swedish government itself.
The op-ed authors went on to demand – and that’s the word they used, “demand” – that Justice Minister Beatrice Ask “appoint a commission to investigate, map, and come up with specific action plans to combat the widespread hate crimes against Muslims.” They called on the government “to stop the march of fascism” (as represented, apparently, by that lone man in the parking structure who allegedly pulled off the woman’s headscarf). And they proclaimed what they called a “hijabupprop” – a hijab action. “We encourage all of our sisters in Sweden – religious and non-religious – to veil themselves on the morning of August 19 to show solidarity with all Muslim women who, all too often, suffer harassment and violence.”
The five authors tweeted their call to action on Twitter. The tweet was shared over 65,000 times. The idea was brilliant, providing politically correct Swedes with an excellent opportunity to posture. And it proved a magnificent success. In “solidarity” with the purported victim, countless Swedish women – including a number of well-known actors, writers, journalists, artists, and politicians – wore headscarves on Monday. And took pictures of themselves doing so. Their photos flooded Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
One of the women who proudly donned traditional Muslim headgear was Gudrun Schyman of the Feminist Initiative, a leading women’s rights group. Another was Social Democratic politician Veronica Palm, who announced on Facebook that she supported the hijab action “because nobody should feel threatened or harassed because of the way they choose to dress.” Sweden’s Humanist organization issued a statement in support of the campaign, declaring that all men and women have a right to dress as they wish.
Justice Minister Beatrice Ask, for her part, invited the hijab campaign’s organizers to meet with her on Tuesday. “I would love to hear what they have to say,” she told the media, “because I believe they have more to say than what they can write in an op-ed.” She underscored that the hijab-yanking incident “should be taken very seriously,” as should the views of the campaign organizers. As for the organizers, while they agreed to meet Ask, they didn’t hide the fact that they were sore at her for turning down a joint TV interview with them. “We’ll meet her, of course, but we won’t be satisfied with that,” one of them griped. “We want her to take action.”
The Swedish news media, notorious for the decorous silence it has long maintained about the country’s rape crisis, were all over this story. The newspapers were awash in stories about the hijab campaign and full of pictures of the famous Swedish women in Muslim headscarves. The hijab campaigners were interviewed repeatedly on TV and radio. One of them, Nabila Abdul Fattah, admitted that their goal was “to normalize the hijab.”
There were very few dissenting voices – at least not in the public square. Muslim feminist Hanna Gadban was furious about the campaign, and tried to remind everyone that the hijab is a symbol of patriarchal oppression. But she was a voice crying in the wilderness. Like a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon to a dipsomaniac, the hijab action was just too irresistible to the Swedish mind.
Sitting at my computer and looking over all the pictures of Swedish women in headscarves, I pondered, more bemused than ever, the eternal question: what is it in the Swedish character that makes such foolishness possible? The zillions of photos of stupid, self-satisfied infidel women in veils symbolizing female subordination were ridiculous, deserving of mockery, of derisive laughter. But they were also scary. Seeing brainwashed people is always scary. “What’s wrong with these people?” I said aloud as I pored over the screwy selfies. “Whatever it is,” my partner said, “it should be in the DSM.”
Even as all this nonsense was underway, Sweden, which has the world’s second highest rape statistics – thanks to nothing more or less than the army of savage Muslim men within its borders who have no respect or mercy whatsoever for unveiled infidel women – was inexorably moving up toward the title of world’s #1 rape nation. And there was no sign of anyone doing anything whatsoever about it.
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