Liberals and SJWs – but also some conservatives – were upset at my appearance on the Neil Cavuto show this week, hosted by the great Stuart Varney of Fox Business’s top-rated Varney & Co. Media matters even tweeted out the transcript of my appearance, which was both flattering and saved me some writing time:
STUART VARNEY (GUEST HOST): How is this for not being politically correct, three more towns in France banning the Burkini. France’s Prime Minister supporting these towns, he says the full-body swimsuit for Muslim women goes against French values. Louise, do you think the French are doing the right thing banning the Burkini?
LOUISE MENSCH: Stu, I really do. I think the bikini and the burqa and the full face niqab are grossly offensive garments that say terrible things about women’s bodies. They say that a woman’s ordinary body is immodest, I think it’s basically hate speech in a piece of clothing. Would you allow somebody to go out into the streets and wear a big t-shirt saying “I hate Muslims?” When you wear those clothes, you’re saying “I hate women,” and it’s that attitude that leads to honor killings of women. I’m glad France is doing this.
[…]
MENSCH: I think you should exclude these kind of extremist garments from French culture, they go against French laws of secularism, which, by the way, apply in France to all religions. Furthermore, you don’t need to wear this shroud to go swimming, and you can smuggle weapons.
[…]
MENSCH: We saw it causing riots. Why were there riots? It’s because Muslims objected to somebody taking a photograph of this woman in this offensive garment. If she dishes out offensive speech in her clothing, she has to take it.
This is my argument in a nutshell. 1, Islam does not require extreme veiling. 2. Even if it did, it would not be acceptable. It states using religion as a pretext that the basic bodies of women are immodest and dirty.
‘But diving suits! Nuns habits!’ people say to me. ‘Chinese facekinis to avoid the sun! Beekeepers’ helmets! Motorbike helmets!’
This is nothing to the point. None of those items of clothing can be hate speech because they do not exist for psychiatric rationales. They are not worn because of a belief that the features or the normal skin of a woman are immodest and must be hidden from men.
When a woman sees another woman in a niqab or a Japanese tourist wearing a paper mask against the fumes, she knows the first is calling her immodest, the second is not. The first is publicly stating her features, too, should be shrouded; the second is not. The burkini does not cover the face, but its full-body extremism, not applied to Muslim males in the sect, says that women’s bodies are immodest when men’s bodies are just fine uncovered.
The argument is made that we must have freedom of religion under the First Amendment; but I would reply that this freedom is not untrammeled. One cannot legally practise polygamy. In terms of clothing, one cannot walk around naked; it’s a public order offence. My view is that the extreme forms of veiling are hate speech towards women. Even if practised by women as a choice – and often they may not be – they still constitute hate speech towards other women. It is false to say that women are not capable of misogyny. In India, very often mothers-in-law commit horrific and misogynist crimes against daughters-in-law. Those saying the burkini is free speech seemed angered that a Corsican tourist exercised his free speech by taking a photo of the woman in the insulting, disgusting garment. Muslim men tried to hurt him; Corsicans fought back; hence the ban; a public order offense.
We in the West have become shamefully inured to hate speech against women. The woman who walks down the street shrouding her features is not merely making a public statement about herself, but about me and my daughter. She is saying that women should shield their faces from display. There is nothing in the Holy Quran that says women should cover their hair, far less their features. Both sexes are merely enjoined to modesty.
The point about all rights and freedoms is that they are a balance. Those arguing for the right of a woman to wear an offensive, extremist swimsuit or a public shroud would baulk at allowing the KKK to go out in their hoods, or for a man to walk around a Muslim neighborhood with a t-shirt saying ‘Muhammed Was a Paedophile’. I would not allow those two things either; you are inciting violence. A skullcap, a Sikh turban, a Christian cross, a Muslim hijab, all of these are normal religious symbols that make no offensive comments. But extreme veiling does indeed do that. Jewish extremists in Jerusalem put up posters in their areas telling women to sit at the back of buses, and in one London area to walk on the opposite side of the pavement /sidewalk from men; after complaints the police took their signs down. When your religious extremism comments on all women, keep it inside the hell of your private houses.
Nor is this theoretical. The false “modesty” narrative created by extreme public veiling is getting women killed. A non-Muslim woman and her daughter were attacked on a beach in France by an extremist Muslim man for being ‘improperly dressed’. Every day, Muslim and ex-Muslim women are killed by their own extremist families, sometimes including the other women of that same family, for “immodesty” in “honor” killings. “Cultural” acceptance of misogyny under the name of religion is directly contributory not just to theoretical harms, but to actual maiming, actual deaths, and not merely a few of them.
That is why I do not believe I am a hypocrite for defending the right to be offensive, and rude, and saying that public shrouding is a step too far. I believe in the right to be rude. But I also believe that somebody shouting Islamophobic slurs outside a mosque should be arrested. When rudeness incites violence, you cross the line from offensive and disgusting, as burkas are, to downright dangerous, which they also are. I want to ban them from public life not because they are rude but because they incite hatred of and contempt for women to such a degree that women die, and that women’s basic rights in the Muslim world are overlooked by our smug diplomats, male and female, in the name of culture.
There is a lot of evidence that women do not wish to shroud themselves. But it is not totally relevant, for there are doubtless some women who do want that. They should not be allowed to use this form of hate speech in public. They harm OTHER women, all other women. Indeed, public acceptance of the burka and niqab and burkini is in fact a form of Islamophobia. It gives currency to the idea that Muslim women who wear ‘only’ a hijab or who do not veil at all are doing something wrong. I am insulted and demeaned by any burka, but it is my Muslim sisters who will suffer the most harm by the craven acceptance of this vicious speech in the West.
President Obama will say ‘black lives matter’ and the UK Parliament will tell the Queen she leads a “rainbow nation” to make a point about gay rights, but this same President and this same Queen will bow low before, and mourn, respectively, the King of Saudi Arabia who does not let women vote, work, have parental rights, or drive in cars; whose nation forced at gunpoint a school of girl children to burn alive because they would not let them out of the building because they were “improperly veiled”. (Continues below)
It is the shame of the West that when we talk about civil rights we exclude women’s rights – unless it is abortion in America. For the basics, the right of equality, travel, dress, sex, parenthood, and emancipation, women in our “ally” nations are invisible. They are hidden under their burkas, their niqabs and their burkinis. Most of the time President Obama will not have looked into the face of a slave woman – they are all slaves – in Saudi Arabia. So his brocialism and that of the bien-pensant left and right ignores the shrouded slaves, my sisters, in the Middle East, and says ‘they like’ their subjection.
Religious freedom goes as far as the KKK hood, for there is no difference between it and the niqab or burka.