Pity the French who are exhibiting advanced dementia and are increasingly becoming, in the epitaph once reserved for the crumbling Ottoman empire, the sick man of Europe. All that is dangerous about Islam, the French strive to protect. All that is good about Islam, they seek to undermine.
The French, of course, whose British Ambassador famously dismissed Israel as “a sh–ty little country,” have also declared that suicide bombings in Israel, while regrettable, are understandable in light of Israeli provocation. And of course, they have done little more than verbally condemn the horrific wave of Islamic anti-Semitism that has arisen in their own country.
But man are they tough where it really counts. I am referring of course to something far worse than terrorism, Islamic women’s head scarves.
A recent French government report called for a law banning these “conspicuous” religious symbols, and Jacques Chirac recently told high-school students in Tunis that he saw “something aggressive” in the wearing of Muslim veils and pledged that he would get the French government to ban students from wearing, what he called “ostentatious signs of religious proselytism.” Furthermore, a group of France’s most famous women declared in an open letter in Elle that, “The Islamic veil sends us all – Muslims and non-Muslims – back to a discrimination against women that is intolerable.”
Thank God the French are also cracking down on the terrible danger posed by Islamic women who have the truly dangerous practice of demanding they only be treated by female doctors. The French are absolutely correct that Islamic women refusing to undress in front of a male doctor is a threat to world peace.
Time for a reality check.
The crisis of Islam, of course, has nothing to do with how Islamic women choose to dress, or their dignified desire to protect their modesty even in medical situations. I applaud those Islamic women in the West who exercise their free choice to cover their bodies and not participate in the increasing Western sport of women as male entertainment. The fact that they overdo it is a lot better than under-doing it. And who are the French, anyway, to lecture the world about women’s rights when they are at the forefront of female exploitation and misogyny?
The New York Times reported that Galeries Lafayette, the French Bloomingdale’s, brought in striptease artists as part of their promotion for their line of 80 different thongs, many “designed to be visible above low-slung pants or skirts.” In France, even your neighborhood, family department store has become a strip joint. And who said French husbands hated shopping with their wives? Young Parisian women are also wearing thongs that come in a see-through plastic ball and which is worn around the neck – just in case the men don’t know that they’re not wearing any underwear.
In France, according to the head of La Meute, a prominent feminist group, “The pornographic and the idea of woman as prostitute has become universal, ordinary.”
Islam was once a great world religion, and some of that glory is still manifest in the desire of its women to safeguard their chastity. It declined when it became synonymous with calls for murder, producing a high percentage of followers who have turned to terror and a low percentage of adherents who condemn their evil deeds.
There is a growing movement to demonize Islam as a murderous and false religion. This is pure , unbecoming of a tolerant West. Every religion must be judged by one criteria alone, namely, the kind of believers it creates. Islam has had some wonderful, golden epochs of academic excellence, and openness, but today it is a dark and sinister shadow of its former, glorious self. Only Muslims can rescue Islam and reinstate its peaceful purposes.
But we in the West can nudge our Muslim brethren along by praising their righteous practices and condemning their malevolent hatred. Islamic headscarves are noble, and should be protected and indeed praised. Islamic terrorism is Satanic and repulsive and must be fought to the death before it takes down with it a lot more than merely a once glorious faith.
How sad that such obvious truths seem well beyond the French.
