"1) Do you understand that Muslim women are supposed to wear such things to reduce their desirability to men because women can’t be trusted with their sexuality?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topless#Cultural_and_legal_issues_in_the_Western_world

"2) What excuse is there, then, for making children wear the scarf?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topless#Cultural_and_legal_issues_in_the_Western_world

"3) Do you understand that the wearing of scarves and other accoutrements has coincided with the resurgence of extreme pan-Islamism."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topless#Cultural_and_legal_issues_in_the_Western_world

"4) Do you realise that many young Muslim women without any history of scarf wearing in their families have suddenly taken up the habit."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topless#Cultural_and_legal_issues_in_the_Western_world

"5) Can you explain young Asian Muslim people wearing the traditional dress of Saudi Arabia as is becoming increasingly common?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topless#Cultural_and_legal_issues_in_the_Western_world

Steel,

How Illuminating. At least we now know you can copy and paste. What a waste of a post. But let me try and reply anyway.

>> “IN AUSTRALIA, women are FORCED to wear chest pieces to "protect" us men and other women from harm caused by looking at the breasts.”

Just how many women do you think there are who want to go about without a shirt or bra? Bra’s themselves serve the very useful function of supporting a women’s breasts allowing her greater freedom of motion. They also prevent the third world effect of having breasts around your waste by the time your thirty. I’m all for allowing women to go topless if they want. I’m not sure how many actually want to.

I don’t care about the headscarf. If all it was, was a piece of cloth I wouldn’t care. However the rise in the number of women wearing headscarves has very closely followed the rise of strict literalist and Pan-Islamic sects. I challenge you to deny this.

“ >> symptomatic of the disease of western righteousness”

To compare the wonder bra to the burqa is a bizarre and extreme but not completely unreasonable action. But to suggest that the plight of women in Saudi or under the Taliban has any real commonality with that of women in the west is a breathtaking act of stupidity or ignorance.

Ok You don’t like western values. Fine. But don’t pretend for a second that there is any equivalence here. Your soft left rhetoric is typical of those who criticize western cultural values whilst fully enjoying its fruits.

If you can’t see that womens’ and minority rights in Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, are hundreds of years behind the west then you are an apologist and sad one at that.

You would be absolutely appalled if someone in your workplace was to treat a woman in the way women are regularly treated in the middle east. And that makes you a HYPOCRITE.

BTW if you have a website in mind by way of a reply, don't bother.

Tend to agree with those who liked the article.

We all trooped off at uni a couple of years ago to hear an Imam who had come up from Sydney, talk about Islam, the students on campus were running an Islamic "awareness week." So one of the handouts they gave out had a bit of an FAQ section.

to the question "I live in a hot climate and the hijab is not comfortable to wear, should I have to wear it?" ... the leaflet said "it may be hot where you live, but not as hot as the burning fires of hell!" (or very similar).

Which raises two points. Firstly, when you have people like this doing your PR, you have a problem. Secondly and more seriously, the gist of the literature and discussion on head (and more) covering was as others have stated on this thread - men are basically incapable of controlling their baser instincts and therefore need to be prevented from the sight of exposed female flesh. Which concurrently reduces women to the status of horseflesh that needs to be covered from prying eyes lest they attract unwanted attention.

All of you apologists for the hijab/burqua, make no mistake. A percentage of muslim women are browbeaten into wearing it for fear of sanction (I would not want to speculate a percentage worldwide but the type of event in that Reuters article is not isolated in the Islamic world). Hilali's "uncovered meat" comments represent an accurate portrayal of a proportion of the Islamic community, and though I have not seen research on this topic, I suspect it is not an insignificant one.

Marilyn

Your views on Jews are really a bit wonky. Orthodox Jewish women do not have to wear wigs or scarves, that is only by a minority sect. The Jews of Spanish and middle Eastern background have never worn them. Nor have the mainstream European orthodox. For those few Jews who do wear them, the men wear even more outlandish clothing. They would be the equivalent of the Amish. Mainstream Jews orthodox or Progressive criticize them for their attire.

In the case of the headscarf I have seen a woman in sweltering heat wearing one while her husband was comfortably attired in an open neck short sleeved shirt. This didn't seem fair to me. It is a very warm piece of material. I wonder if your mother wore one in mid-summer. If so she would have been very unusual.

Certainly my mother, grandmothers or great grandmother (who I just remember from her days in Parkville) never wore one, or a wig for that matter. And except for my mother they were orthodox.

I wish Paul L was wrong in what he says, but I get the impression he’s right. Apart from the breast excursion, his post stands uncontradicted.

If he’s right, what do we conclude about Muslim women’s head-gear? It seems to me that, in the West, these women (many of them, anyway) are being used. From what I’ve seen, there seem to be more scarved women than bearded men around. The majority of Muslim men seem to travel incognito. Interesting that it is the women being pushed by their brave men towards the bayonets of local disapproval. Imagine being oppressed into invisibility, and then being required to be conspicuously “invisible” in order to make some point. The point? I don’t know, maybe “We’re here!” “We’re right!” I’m guessing about the point.

A strange sort of invisibility, to be sure.

Pax,

Ginx

You are right - the piece you quote was very clumsy and looked a bit like public servant gobbledegook. My apologies - I am not a public servant.

I do not write departmental policy - indeed I despise the distortions in governmental departmental policy as they reflect much of the politically correct nonsense that has been written in the posts responding to the original article.

What I wrote was a rather clumsy attempt (I admit) to suggest that too many posters to this list are trying to avoid the real issue, the huge elephant in the room (the link between renascent radical Muslim and the increasing emphasis on the need for women to wear the hijab, thereby reinforcing their subordination) by politically correct comments or arguments which are way off the point. I was trying to do so without being as blunt as I am now.

As Daniel Barenboim said a couple of years ago (in, I think, the Reith lectures) - to be politically correct is an act of intellectual cowardice because it allows a person to take part in a conversation without having to form their own opinion, an opinion for which they may be criticized.