Canadian Jewish News Writer Defends the Niqab--In the Name of Freedom

(Here's my latest for The Megaphone.)

A "Guest Voice" in the Canadian Jewish News — she’s a freelancer named Danielle Kubes — frets the au courant issue of wearing the niqab during the Citizenship Ceremony and what it betokens for Canadian Jews.

Kubes writes:

Those who fear that Ishaq's niqab represents a culture so contrary to ours that cannot they cannot coexist, that if we cannot protect our borders from the danger of her veil, we must as least insulate our most sacred institutions, should recall that this fear is identical to the one Jews were subjected to...The hysteria is familiar and tiresome.

Be assured that if we allow this fear to aim its arrow at Ishaq's dress, the archer's bow will soon be spun around to face us.

Be assured that it won't.

Be assured that, in fact, Ishaq's dress is a big problem, especially for Jews, because, as anyone who has ever experienced the hysteria -- the frenzy -- of an Al Quds Day at Toronto's Queen's Park can tell you, the more Khomeinists and by-the-book Muslims dressed in their colourful (and not so colourful) local garb we import from Zion-despising lands, the worse off the Jews will be.

Or has the "Guest Voice" not heard about what's been happening over in France?

What I find tiresome is the prospect of radical Muslims getting a pass by virtue of age-old canards and aspersions aimed at Jewry.

As if, just because Jews and their doctrines are harmless and blameless, all Muslims and every bit of Islam must be too.

As if there's no jihad or sharia. No beheadings inspired by Muhammed's precedent. No neo-Caliphate taking shape on lands ceded to ISIS in the Middle East. No grandiose Ayatollah promising to obliterate Israel. No "Allahu Akbar!" followed by an infrastructure-shattering "kaboom!"
 
The CJN "Guest Voice” concludes by saying:

When we support Ishaq's freedom, we support our own. And if we do not fight for Ishaq, who will be left to fight for us?

I hate to be the one to break it to the niqab champion (not really; I'm actually delighted to be the one to do it), but the truth is that Ishaq and her ilk will never fight for us and our freedom.

Ishaq is taking advantage of the freedoms we afford our immigrants in order to bring a little piece of her civilization's darkness to our shores.

That being so, it isn't Ishaq and her niqab that scare me. What scares me are tender-hearted, loud-mouthed "progressives" who know squat about the real world and the civilizational challenges we face, but who are convinced that they and they alone have it all figured out.

You know -- people like Barack Obama. They're the ones who are truly terrifying, not the least because of the very real damage they can do.

Ishaq can, if she so chooses, take off her veil. But there is no removing the niqab of the mind -- in other words, the worldview -- that afflicts and that blinds most "progressives.”