Wednesday WTF is back! For my newer readers, it was a thing I used to do, every Wednesday, posting the most ridiculously WTF thing of the week as my Wednesday WTF. I quit for awhile, but I'm reinstating the practice as of this week. Yay!
This renewal of the Wednesday WTF comes courtesy of the burqa fight in Europe. It's already been covered elsewhere just how fucked up this idea is, particularly as it uses an appropriation of feminist principles and language to justify racism and further oppressing the women of the already-oppressed group by targeting their specific accoutrements, thus neatly allowing anti-Muslim governments to oppress Muslim women in the name of women's liberation. But I want to point out something very simple that apparently did not manage to make it to the notice of Jean-Francois Cope, majority leader in the French National Assembly, when he was writing and titling his op-ed.
Titling it "Tearing Away the Veil" does nothing to advance your claim that it's not about stigmatizing or oppressing Muslim women. I don't care how cute the phrase is, you're arguing that this is not a targeted move against women who veil in the same breath that you use a title of violent imagery that summons a mental picture of someone forcibly ripping off a woman's burqa/niqab. Message consistency FAIL.
But hey, at least you're being honest about what you're trying to do here.
