Tuesday, Feb. 1 is No Hijab Day. The courageous Iranian-American human rights activist Masih Alinejad tweeted a video of a woman in Iran with the comment: “She has a message for World Hijab Day: ‘We don’t want hijab day, we want #NoHijabDay. Hijab is a weapon used to arrest women and throw them in jail. To punish them for no reason.’ Walking unveiled in Iran, women can get arrested, lashed and imprisoned. #LetUsTalk #FreeFromHijab”
This is true: women in Iran for years now have been protesting against the Islamic regime by daring to take off their hijabs, despite the fact that they face heavy prison sentences for doing so. In the U.S., feminists have been donning hijabs in solidarity with Muslim women who are supposedly oppressed (by those fictional but omnipresent MAGA-hat-wearing thugs) for wearing the headscarf here; World Hijab Day, which has been going on for several years now, is celebrated on Tuesday, Feb. 1. But now on the same day, Alinejad and others are making a genuine stand for freedom and proclaiming No Hijab Day.
The irony behind the feminists’ virtue-signaling is that many, if not most, of the most celebrated cases claiming the harassment of women and girls wearing hijab turned out to have been faked by the victims themselves. 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 who claimed in Dec. 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 Nov. 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 manifest fact that the hijab symbolizes the subjugation of women in Islam. Women are required to wear the hijab according to Islamic law because it is their responsibility to remove temptation from men. If men are tempted anyway and they end up being sexually assaulted or raped, it’s their fault. Because the hijab is an important part of a woman’s responsibility under Sharia, many women have been brutalized and even killed for not wearing it.
There are numerous examples of this, and many more that we do not know about and never will know about. 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. Police shot women in Chechnya with paintballs because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.
Related: California Public School Holds Hijab Day, Hilarity Ensues
Elementary school teachers in Tunisia were threatened with death for not wearing hijab. Syrian schoolgirls were forbidden to go to school unless they wore hijab. Women in Gaza were forced by Hamas to wear hijab. Women in London were threatened with murder by Muslim thugs if they didn’t wear hijab. An anonymous young Muslim woman doffed her hijab outside her home and started living a double life in fear of her parents. Fifteen girls in Saudi Arabia 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. A girl in Italy had her head shaved by her mother for not wearing hijab.
Other women and girls have been killed or threatened, or live in fear for daring not to wear the hijab. But up until now, the focus has been all on the supposedly oppressed hijabis in the West. The organizers of No Hijab Day are to be commended for injecting a note of sanity into the proceedings.
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