Saturday, Feb. 1, is another World Hijab Day, a Western feminist expression of solidarity with Muslim women in the United States who are supposedly oppressed and discriminated against because they wear the hijab. The National Education Association (NEA) is going in for this in a big way out of concern for hijab-wearing Muslim women who have supposedly been discriminated against. Notably absent, however, is any NEA concern for women who have been victimized for not wearing the hijab.
The NEA asserted Wednesday that “Muslim students in the United States—from middle school through college and university—are experiencing harassment, discrimination, and bullying at scary rates, surveys show. On college campuses, 49% of Muslim students experienced harassment or discrimination due to their Muslim identity, they told the Council on American–Islamic Relations-CA in 2024. More than one in three felt targeted by professors; more than half by their peers.” That would be terrible indeed, but it ain’t necessarily so.
Nonetheless, in order to counter this alleged harassment and discrimination, the NEA wants you to observe World Hijab Day, and quotes one of the proponents of the day as saying: “The whole goal is to dismantle Islamophobia.” The idea that there have been any significant manifestations of “Islamophobia” is, however, dubious; note that the NEA relies for its data on the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Yet CAIR has been caught promoting numerous fake hate crimes.
Also, the oppression related to the hijab is not linked to wearing it, but to not wearing it. Actual incidents of Muslim women being harassed or discriminated against for wearing the hijab in the U.S., meanwhile, 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.
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 World Hijab Day is once again being celebrated. 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 as if they’re 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.
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.
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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.
When is the NEA’s day for all these women, and so many others who have been brutalized or even killed for not wearing hijab?
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