The last time I looked, no one in a shark suit tried to rob a bank, or make a get-a-way from a crime scene, but men dressed in burkas have.
That said, I agree with a few of my colleagues that we’re way past the simple measure of banning burkas, when the rest of society is being islamized at an amazing pace. In a few decades time all those ‘anti-burka’ laws will have been rescinded when political Islam (is there any other?) takes up real political power in the lands its invaded and begins calling the shots in a more assertive way.
What we should be doing is underlining the natural right of business to refuse service to members of the public who fail to meet their standards of attire. No shoes, no shirts, no service is a standard practice, so to should banning garments that hide the face become a regular feature. It’s not a valid argument that because one’s own belief system demands it, non-believers should be forced to allow it, to accept it as well.
I doubt very seriously that a man wearing a shark’s head advertising for a company’s product, would be allowed to wear it in a bank while conducting transactions, nor would he. There is no moral argument for allowing people who cover their faces as a normal routine of life to impose their chosen lifestyle upon others. I say that people are then free to pop open an umbrella in the puss of a women wearing a burka and hold it there as long as the person is looking at them. If they’re not allowed to see their face, then burka’d woman shouldn’t be allowed to see the face of anyone else.
An Austrian shark-man just proved why burqa bans are stupid
Excluding situations involving security checkpoints, schools, and courtrooms etc., burqa bans are stupid.
This week, we saw a fantastic example why that’s true, when an Austrian man was cautioned by police for dressing up as a shark. According to Sky News, the gentlemen was advertising for a computer store named McShark, and was fined after he refused a police request to remove his shark head. That refusal meant he had contravened a new Austrian law requiring anyone in public to show their face between hairline and chin.
The surreal quality of this story speaks to something important: as a general rule, face concealment bans are stupid.
First off, designed to stop Muslim women who wear near-full/full face burqa or niqab veils from doing so, the ban attempts to treat a symptom of failed assimilation rather than its source. As I’ve noted, Europe’s problem with Muslim self-segregation from civil society is largely a result of Europe’s failure to match immigrant communities to opportunity and expectation.
Successive generations of Muslim immigrants in Europe have struggled to attain the same measure of social mobility as their American counterparts, while also being made to feel unwelcome. The high incidence of welfare dependency in European Muslim communities also speaks to Europe’s failure to demand work in return for residency. Work matters, of course, because it gives us a sense of binding to our fellow citizens and society.
Here’s the rest of Rogan’s ill thought out mess of a piece.
