It happened on “World Hijab Day.”
A Muslim student at the University of Central Florida, Rayyan Sukkarieh, grew enraged when another student, Kathy Zhu, refused her invitation to don a hijab in solidarity with supposedly oppressed Muslim women.
Sukkarieh took to Twitter to admonish Zhu: “You didn’t take the time to even ask questions or try to understand what Hijab is. That’s ignorant of you. You literally sprinted after taking the photos. Pathetic.” Sukkarieh added: “TWITTER DO YOUR THING. Let’s get this girl expelled….Ignorance will not be tolerated at my campus.”
Happily, UCF officials rejected this call to expel Zhu. That Sukkarieh made it at all, however, reveals the authoritarianism and coercion at the heart of both Leftism and Islam.
Sukkarieh’s demand is the problem many in the West have with the hijab in the first place — wearing it is not a choice for all too many Muslim women, but rather a symbol of their oppression and subjugation.
Indeed, World Hijab Day is a sick farce in the first place. Muslim women all over the world are forced to wear the hijab and subjected to violence if they do not. Courageous women in the Islamic Republic of Iran are taking off their hijabs as a sign of resistance to the oppressive Sharia regime under which they live, and at least 29 women have been arrested for doing so.
Yet instead of recognizing reality, women in the U.S. are fed the false narrative that hijab-wearing women are actually being harassed and persecuted in the West — and that standing in solidarity with them is feminist.
The harassment and persecution is more manufactured than real. Just weeks ago, 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 who 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.
Nonetheless, on World Hijab Day non-Muslim women all over the country wore hijabs in solidarity with Muslim women who are supposedly plagued by “Islamophobic” harassment.
But where was their concern for Aqsa Parvez?
Her Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it.
Or for Aqsa and Amina Muse Ali, a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab?
They showed no concern for the 40 women who were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab; or for Alya Al-Safar, whose Muslim cousin threatened to kill her and harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain; or for Amira Osman Hamid, who faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab; or for the Egyptian girl, also named Amira, who committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab; or for the Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia who were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired; or for the women in Chechnya whom police shot with paintballs because they weren’t wearing hijab; or for the women in Chechnya who were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab; or for the elementary school teachers in Tunisia who were threatened with death for not wearing hijab; or for the Syrian schoolgirls who were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab; or for the women in Gaza whom Hamas has forced to wear hijab; or for the women in Iran who protested against the regime, even before the recent uprising, by daring to take off their hijabs; or for the women in London whom Muslim thugs threatened to murder if they didn’t wear hijab; or for the anonymous young Muslim woman who doffed her hijab outside her home and started living a double life in fear of her parents; or for the fifteen girls in Saudi Arabia who were killed when the religious police wouldn’t let them leave their burning school building because they had taken off their hijabs in their all-female environment; or for the girl in Italy whose mother shaved her head for not wearing hijab; or for all the other women and girls who have been killed or threatened, or who live in fear for daring not to wear the hijab.
Who is standing in solidarity with them?
Not Western feminists.
Meanwhile, at the University of Central Florida, Kathy Zhu noted: “I think it’s kind of ridiculous how people are trying to censor others for disagreeing with them, and then trying to get them kicked out. That’s the definition of fascism.”
Indeed. And that’s campus life in the United States, February 2018.
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