RUTHFULLY YOURS

“While the brave Iranian women protested against hijab laws, Western feminists celebrated hijab”. — Rita Panahi, Herald Sun, Australia.

Instead of a celebration of Islamist discrimination against women, the West should promote a #MeToo in the mosque, the idea of an Egyptian, Mona Eltahawi. She would like to raise the issue of rape and sexual abuse suffered by Muslim women during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Will the Western advocates of women’s rights also stand for the rights of Muslim women, or, in the name of “multiculturalism”, the will they keep appeasing those who persecute them instead?

While the march for women’s rights in Washington this year took place under the banner of #MeToo against sexual harassment, in Iran dozens of women were taking to the streets to protest against theocracy and compulsory wearing of the hijab. The Iranian women waved white flags to fight against the mullahs’ obligation to veil. But the white flag was not a surrender; it was apparently a symbol of Western feminists. As the Australian Rita Panahi wrote, “while the brave Iranian women protested against hijab laws, Western feminists celebrated hijab”.

On February 1, many of these Iranian women were arrested for not wearing a hijab. On that very day, the World Hijab Day was celebrated in the West, and Western appeasers celebrated the veil. Even British PM Theresa May backed the claim that women should be “free” to wear hijab. A few days after that, the American department store Macy’s decided to sell the hijab as an item of fashion clothing. Unfortunately, in some Islamic countries, women are not “free” to wear the veil; they are obliged to wear the veil, as the arrests in Iran show us.

Instead of a celebration of Islamist discrimination against women, the West should promote a #MeToo in the mosque — the idea of an Egyptian, Mona Eltahawi. She would like to raise the issue of rape and sexual abuse suffered by Muslim women during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

I’ve written many times over the last decade and a half about that rare bird the “moderate Muslim”. Surely one reason for his scarceness is that, whenever he pops his head above the parapet, he’s hung out to dry by craven infidel politicians and bureaucrats, who on the whole find the admirably straightforward demands of your average firebreathing imam more congenial. Hence the pandering to returning Isis warriors: Mods vs Raqqa’s – it’s no contest.

The latest examples are the headmistress and chairman of the board of governors of St Stephen’s Primary School in Newham, East London. St Stephen, you’ll recall, was the first Christian martyr, but observant Christians are thinner on the ground in today’s Newham than they were in first-century Jerusalem. So St Stephen’s School today is mostly Muslim. Nevertheless:

In June last year, [headmistress Neena] Lall removed the hijab from the school uniform for girls aged seven and under and tried to curb young children from fasting at school in case they became unwell.

Good for her. Hijabs for under-sevens? If you’re in most Muslim countries, you notice that the gals don’t disappear under the veil until puberty: Covered kindergartners is largely a western phenomenon.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria—Dozens of schoolgirls remained missing two days after a jihadist raid on a boarding school in northeastern Nigeria raised fears of a repeat of the mass kidnapping in Chibok in 2014.

A convoy of fighters in machine-gun-mounted trucks from the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency rolled into the Government Girls Science Technical College in the town of Dapchi, Yobe state, on Monday evening, local officials and Western diplomats said.

Police officers and teachers initially said they believed the 800-member student body was safe after fleeing to their homes and nearby villages. But dozens still remained unaccounted for, Yobe state police commissioner Summonu Abdulmalik said.

Nigeria’s government confirmed late Wednesday that the attackers were from the militant group that also carried out the Chibok raid.

The Nigerian military said it saved “some of the girls from the terrorists who abducted them” in an operation, without giving figures. Residents of Dapchi reached by telephone in Dapchi, a remote and dust-caked village less than 50 miles from Nigeria’s border with Niger, said they were celebrating the return of some of the girls, adding that not all had returned home.

President Muhammadu Buhari said on Twitter that he had dispatched his defense minister to Yobe and directed military and police “to mobilize immediately to ensure that all the missing girls…are found.”