In shattered, staggering, dhimmi Britain today, the far-left Labour government is extremely concerned with making sure that the native population doesn’t wake up to the enormity of what its own government is doing to it, and above all that it doesn’t get angry about it. And so it devotes an enormous amount of time and attention, as well as taxpayer money, to dealing with the phantom problem of “Islamophobia.” The objective is to convince native Britons that the biggest problem the nation faces is not the prospect of the natives becoming a minority in their own country, and having to live under a foreign and authoritarian legal system, but the “far-right extremists” who think all this is a bad idea.
As part of this effort, the British government attempts to convince its hapless citizens that Islam is as British as an afternoon cup of tea. Thus it was that on Wednesday, Algemeiner reported that “British Council staff were told during an Islamophobia training session that the Virgin Mary wore a hijab, sparking controversy over course materials accused of rewriting religious history to draw a modern parallel between Islamic and Christian traditions.”
Now, you might think that the Virgin Mary did actually wear a hijab, as she is invariably pictured with her head covered. There is, however, an immense difference between the head covering that a Jewish woman of the first century would have worn and the hijab that Muslim women wear today. Both are expressions of modesty, yes, but the hijab carries with it an air of coercion and a hint of violence that diverges sharply from the Jewish and Christian understandings of modesty.
In Islamic culture, it is the woman’s responsibility to keep men from being tempted. If a man is tempted anyway and a woman is sexually assaulted or raped, it is the woman’s fault. Accordingly, most of the women in prison in Pakistan are there because they were raped. And innumerable women worldwide have been threatened, brutalized, and even killed for not wearing the hijab.
Coercion and terror aren’t modesty, but nevertheless, the idea that any head covering for women is equivalent to the hijab was part of the party line in this initiative against “Islamophobia: “As part of a taxpayer-funded Project Unity training program, North Yorkshire Council staff involved in counter-terrorism efforts attended a seminar in northern England focused on combating ‘myths and misinformation about Muslims,’ British media reported.”
As part of this effort to make sure everyone liked Islam, Abbas Najib, “a former police officer and CEO of Better Communities Bradford — a charity that delivers community and counter-extremism training — led the session, telling council workers that ‘Mother Mary wore a hijab’ as he explained that head coverings were a tradition shared across different faiths and cultures.”
The Project Unity seminar also claimed that “the hijab was prevalent in the UK only 100 years ago.” According to Algemeiner, Najib used “images of shawls worn in early 20th-century Britain to illustrate the point, even though the garments depicted were unrelated to Islamic practice.”
When word got out about this manipulative exercise in deception, Najib offered a reductionist explanation, saying: “Hijab is an Arabic word that simply means ‘covering,’ and in everyday usage, it refers to a woman’s head covering.” He added “that his lecture was meant to show that covering the head is a tradition shared by many faiths and cultures, not something unique to Islam.” Great, but when he said all that without noting the coercive aspect of the hijab, he was leaving out a crucially important part of the story.
Related: Iran Touts Islam's Teachings of Equality. Reality, As Always, Is Different.
Also, to say that the Virgin Mary wore a hijab is to imply that Islam influenced Judaism (and Christianity), and not the other way around. As Algemeiner notes: “Mary lived about 600 years before the emergence of Islam, so her practice of covering her head came from the Jewish traditions and customs of her time, rather than from the later Islamic teachings surrounding the hijab.”
But the facts, as is so often the case, are secondary to the narrative, which is being energetically distributed: “Since Project Unity was launched last year, it has reached more than 2,500 people across West and North Yorkshire in northern England, purportedly helping participants better understand the diverse communities they serve and find areas of common ground.” It got $47,000 in taxpayer money to do this. That figures.
