Both sides wrong on burqas

Sarah Hanson-Young must hate sharing half her surname with her older One Nation nemesis across the Senate chamber.

Is there a Mr Young somewhere who has a story to tell? What a splendid love child the South Australian would make.

But the combative pair could not be more different — Pauline Hanson incoherently Right and Hanson-Young verbosely Left.

In a clash of medieval proportions, Hanson the Younger has accused Hanson the Terrible of raining down Islamic fury on Australians for wearing a burqa to make a point.

“Pauline, I think you need to really reflect on the fact that security experts, foreign policy experts have said that what you did last week will now be used as the recent kind of fodder for promoting extremism,” Hanson-Young claimed in a spat on breakfast TV.

“You are doing (Islamic State’s) work for them. It is extremely dangerous. You’re putting the entire country at risk ... The next attack in Australia will be on your head, Pauline.”

It is the same sort of alarmism that so discredits the Greens with average Australians over climate change.

They damage the very issues they are trying to promote.

What we hear are vacuous assertions that every wild storm or bushfire is caused by global warming. They make unscientific links between individual events and causes.

The cherry on top is always that Australia is to blame because we burn fossil fuels. And then comes the obligatory totalitarian call to ban something — in that case it’s usually coal mining.

What makes the burqa issue somewhat unusual is that both senators are in the wrong. Which is what you get with extremists.

At the risk of being accused of “mansplaining”, let me make it clear that neither was wrong because they are women.

They are wrong because they let their political passions obscure their reason, which is hardly a gender-specific problem.

In the case of Hanson, she was wrong to demean the Senate by pulling on such a stunt within the chamber.

She can hold whatever views she wants about Islam and Muslims, but as an elected representative in the Federal Parliament she needs to conduct herself within accepted parameters.

My main problem with Hanson’s ban-the-burqa mantra is that she is using a sledgehammer to hit a flea.

How many women in Australia wear a burqa? A hundred? A few hundred? Does anyone know?

And we’re not talking about the niqab and hijab which are much more widely worn and seem to draw less offence.

Hanson focuses directly on the “confronting” full-body burqa.

Her professed security concerns are obviously over-egged. If someone wearing a burqa causes security problems, then the face-covering should be removed or entry denied.

A person in a burqa stands out wherever they are seen in public. At least the relevant authorities get to know who they are.

Hanson is really as guilty of gesture politics as those on the other side. The burqa is just a symbolic tool for her wider concerns about Islam.

However, the hysterical reaction to Hanson’s stunt, especially the claim she ridiculed all Muslims, is also obviously wrong.

As several letter writers have pointed out in recent days, when Islamic State was thrown out of its stronghold of Raqqa, Muslim women lined up to shed the burqa.

“A group of women pulled off the black robes over their dresses and set them alight after their families were liberated from the city in the north of Syria on Thursday,” the Britain-based Independent reported on July 22. “One woman cried: ‘Give me a lighter, I’m going to burn this. May these clothes they forced us to wear be damned!’”

If the burqa were standard Islamic dress from religious instruction — as many commentators seem to profess — all Muslim women would wear it, or would aspire to do so.

They don’t. The burqa is a customary practice — nothing more — for those fundamentalist Muslims from a few countries whose extreme views coincide with the strongest clashes with Western values.

That’s why it’s so obnoxious to those who love freedom.

And while Muslim women in Australia should be free to wear what they like — and certainly not forced into burqas by husbands and fathers — we are free to say it’s oppressive.

That a professed feminist such as Hanson-Young could be pushed into defending such a symbol of female repression by her PC concerns over creating offence to Muslims underscores the ridiculous path the Left is travelling.

Strangely enough, much of this rubbish is being adopted from the US, which has previously been a source of liberalism but now generates repressive socialism, much of it from university campuses where generations of soft Marxist teaching has borne fruit.

The new US fetish for pulling down monuments that conflict with modern sensibilities — such as those of former Confederate leaders — has quickly migrated to Australia.

They want to obliterate the parts of history that offend them, rather than use them as evidence to point to the failings of the past.

The ABC’s indigenous editor Stan Grant this week made an argument for why there are indigenous people who would prefer to see the tearing down of a statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park because it proclaims he “discovered” Australia.

In a long piece on the taxpayer-funded website, Grant accuses Australians of ignoring the history of dispossession of Aboriginal people.

“Yet this statue speaks to emptiness, it speaks to our invisibility. It says that nothing truly mattered, nothing truly counted, until a white sailor first walked on these shores,” Grant wrote.

But he must know that is not true.

The High Court’s 1992 Mabo judgment threw out the concept of terra nullius.

Australia was rightly forced to accept prior Aboriginal ownership and we legislated to recognise it. Is that invisible to Grant?

Those who want to tear down historic monuments should remember what Islamic State did throughout Iraq and Syria, especially at Palmyra, and what the Taliban did to historic Buddhist sites in Afghanistan.

Is this the path they want to tread?

To mimic furious and intolerant Islamic fundamentalists? UNESCO’s director-general, Irina Bokova, described it as “cultural cleansing”.

Which is exactly what is being attempted here.