World Chess Federation Requires Hijab At Iran Tournament -- Fallaci Tossing Chador At Khomeini's Feet Is Just a Memory

The big news in Chess last month was the decision by FIDE (Federation Internationale des Echecs), which resulted in headlines that Female Chess Players Forced to Wear Hijab as Governing Body Awards World Championship to Iran:

The world's top female chess players have reacted with horror after being told they must compete at next year's world championship wearing a hijab.

Within hours of Iran being revealed as its host country, the prestigious event was plunged into crisis as it emerged players taking part face arrest if they don't cover up.

Hijab Hijinks

Jack Straw writes that "wearing the full veil was bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult".

A British education minister says he supports universities that ban Islamic students from wearing veils.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi said on Tuesday that Muslim immigrant women should not be completely “hidden” behind full veils if they want to integrate and become part of Italy’s future.

Tony Blair said the full face veils by Muslim women is a "mark of separation" and made some "outside the community feel uncomfortable".

Allahpundit notes that the latest opposition to the veil comes from...Egypt:

Saleh, known in Egypt as “the women’s mufti” for her numerous fatwas, or religious edicts relating to women, rebutted on daily al-Sharq Al-Awsat, that hers was “a personal comment on an increasingly common phenomenon but which was not meant in any way to offend women.”

“There is a significant difference between the hijab, a simple veil which frames the face, and the niqab, which leaves only the eyes visible” she added. “The first is a religious duty, but the second is a sheer cultural convention, which has no raison d’etre in Islamic sources” she said.

Saleh seems to be echoing something more controversial that Amir Taheri wrote back in 2004:

The headgear in question has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. It is not sanctioned anywhere in the Koran, the fundamental text of Islam, or the hadith (traditions) attributed to the Prophet.

This headgear was invented in the early 1970s by Mussa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who had won the leadership of the Lebanese Shi'ite community.

In an interview in 1975 in Beirut, Sadr told this writer that the hijab he had invented was inspired by the headgear of Lebanese Catholic nuns, itself inspired by that of Christian women in classical Western paintings. (A casual visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or the Louvres in Paris, would reveal the original of the neo-Islamist hijab in numerous paintings depicting Virgin Mary and other female figures from the Old and New Testament.)

Sadr's idea was that, by wearing the headgear, Shi'ite women would be clearly marked out, and thus spared sexual harassment, and rape, by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian gunmen who at the time controlled southern Lebanon.

Sadr's neo-hijab made its first appearance in Iran in 1977 as a symbol of Islamist-Marxist opposition to the Shah's regime. When the mullahs seized power in Tehran in 1979, the number of women wearing the hijab exploded into tens of thousands.

In 1981, Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that "scientific research had shown that women's hair emitted rays that drove men insane." To protect the public, the new Islamist regime passed a law in 1982 making the hijab mandatory for females aged above six, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code was made punishable by 100 lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment.

By the mid 1980s, a form of hijab never seen in Islam before the 1970s had become standard gear for millions of women all over the world, including Europe and America.

But the bottom line is, just what does Europe think they are doing?

Of all the ways to confront the growing problem of Islamist violence in Europe, why tackle an issue that is more likely to encourage moderates to join the extremists in protesting what they interpret as an assault on their religion?

Europe is going after veils while failing to go after those who in speech and action encourage the Islamist extremists.

They are likely to fail in the former while losing the war against the latter.

Technorati Tag: Hijab and Blair and Amir Taheri.

In the Same Boat?

I remember when France cracked down on the wearing of the hijab by Moslems--how it was noted that in the public schools the wearing of the kippah was also forbidden. It struck me how Moslems and Jews seemed to be in the same boat.

It seemed like an isolated incident.

Today, I read the following on the online version of the Toronto Star under the headline: 'No Sharia law in Ontario'

Ontario will not become the first Western jurisdiction to allow the use of a set of centuries’ old religious rules called Sharia law to settle Muslim family disputes, and will ban all religious arbitrations in the province, Premier Dalton McGuinty told The Canadian Press on Sunday.

And in case the full implications of "will ban all religious arbitrations in the province," are not clear, just read on to the next paragraph:

In a telephone interview with the national news agency, McGuinty announced his government would move quickly to outlaw existing religious tribunals used for years by Christians and Jews under Ontario’s Arbitration Act.

No more Beis Din.

Would a move by Moslems to demand the option to use Sharia law in the US lead to a similar result? I imagine that the ACLU on the one hand and CAIR on the other would make such an outcome unlikely.

Meanwhile, in England the Sunday Times Reports that Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair

ADVISERS appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims.

They want to replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths.

It's one thing to find ourselves put in the same boat with Moslems and losing rights as a result. But when the Moslems themselves want to put themselves in the same category in order to standardize their propaganda while minimizing...

Well, actually, if Moslems want recognition in a general Genocide Day, perhaps we should oblige:

As Rabbi David G. Dalin, author of The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, points out in his article Hitler's Mufti, Not Hitler's Pope:

Precisely at the moment when Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in Rome (and throughout Europe) was saving thousands of Jewish lives, Hitler had a cleric broadcasting from Berlin who called for the extermination of the Jews.

He was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the viciously anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest and ally of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust.

UPDATE:

I just noticed that the Volokh Conspiracy makes the same point.

David Bernstein writes:

Even worse is the idea that a new "Genocide Day" would include "Muslim deaths in the West Bank and Gaza," thus giving credence to the absurd contention that Israeli policies in those areas amount to "genocide," and thus replacing a memorial to victims of the Holocaust with the fantastical political propaganda of those whose political ancestors (e.g., the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini) allied with the Nazis.

The article he links to about the Grand Mufti at Palestine Facts goes into detail and at the end has a number of links for further reading.

Technorati Tag: Israel.