Newark, N.J. Resolution Proclaims ‘World Hijab Day’ Meanwhile, in Iran, women are dying for the freedom not to wear the hijab. by Robert Spencer
Yesterday, Wednesday, Feb. 1, was No Hijab Day, a Western feminist expression of solidarity with Muslim women in the United States who are supposedly oppressed and discriminated against (by those fictional but omnipresent MAGA-hat-wearing thugs) because they wear the hijab. Accordingly, Newark, N.J. city council President LaMonica McIver is set to introduce a resolution declaring Wednesday World Hijab Day in the City of Newark. McIver, of course, has all the proper Leftist intentions: celebrating “diversity,” standing against “hatred,” and all that. But this year in particular, her gesture is nothing short of grotesque. In Iran, women are dying for the freedom not to wear the hijab. And in Newark, witless Leftists are celebrating the symbol of their oppression.
Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself. Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.
It is against that backdrop that the Newark World Hijab Day resolution will be introduced. For innumerable women in Iran, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it. The Iranian authorities call their morality police the “Guidance Patrol,” an Orwellian name that makes them sound like a bunch of benign, avuncular individuals selflessly dedicated to helping young Iranians avoid moral pitfalls and stay on the straight and narrow. A more accurate name, however, would be the Terror Patrol, for the morality that these officials enforce is not the virtuous person’s free choice of the good, but the enforced obedience of those who are frightened into submission.
Is that really what the city of Newark wants to celebrate? It’s likely that LaMonica McIver didn’t consider what has been happening in Iran even for one second before deciding to introduce her resolution. She was just upholding the Left’s mythology about rampant “Islamophobia” in the United States. Actual incidents of Muslim women being harassed or discriminated against for wearing the hijab, however, are extraordinarily hard to find. It’s much easier to find examples of Muslim women in America who falsely claimed that they were being harassed or discriminated against in order to score points on the Left’s insane scale of victimhood worship.
In one such incident, an eleven-year-old girl in Toronto made international headlines with her claim that a man had followed her and cut her hijab with scissors. After an investigation, police concluded that the attack never happened. Likewise, Yasmin Seweid, a Muslim teen, claimed in December 2016 that Trump supporters on a New York subway tore off her hijab and no one in the packed subway car helped her. She, too, gained international media attention, and she, too, made up the whole thing. Shortly before that, a hijab-wearing Muslim student at San Diego State University also falsely claimed that she was assaulted by Trump supporters. In July 2017, a Muslim in Britain falsely claimed that a man had pulled off her hijab in a “race hate attack.” In November 2016, a University of Michigan Muslim student claimed she was “accosted by a white man who told her to remove her hijab or he would set her ablaze with a cigarette lighter.” She also fabricated the whole event. And there are many others of this kind, but the World Hijab Day feminists, of course, have taken no notice.
Nor have they ever acknowledged the fact that women are far more likely to be oppressed for not wearing the hijab than for wearing it, and not just in Iran. In Mississauga, Ontario, a few years back, Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Amina Muse Ali was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab. Alya Al-Safar’s Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Women in Chechnya were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.
Such examples could be multiplied endlessly. When is LaMonica McIver going to introduce a resolution recognizing the women who have been brutalized and killed for not wearing the hijab? I won’t be watching the news feeds for any word of that.
Comments are closed.
