Three women, two police constables and one community support officer decided to wear full face veiled burkhas and other ‘Muslim women’s clothing’ in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, as part of an effort to understand ‘diversity’ in a police initiative titled ‘In your shoes’. The three went out shopping to feel how it was to be a Muslim woman.
In describing her experience, Sergeant Deb Leonard said:
I have gained an appreciation and understanding of what Muslim females experience when they walk out in public in clothing appropriate to their beliefs.
We are keen to gain a better understanding of issues which our communities face.
Why doesn’t she and her colleagues start walking out in jeans and a t-shirt to also experience what other Muslim women feel when they walk out in public in clothing appropriate to their beliefs!
A South Yorkshire Police in-house magazine said:
The exercise is just one of many activities South Yorkshire Police has planned with communities and ethnic minority leaders to secure strong relationships, celebrate diversity and encourage integration, working towards a safer, closer society.
How would wearing a full face veil (which most Muslim women in this country do not wear anyway – a minority of a minority) or ‘other traditional clothing’ enhance any sort of relationship or make communities safer? Why wear clothing that other Muslim women in this country choose not to wear? How absurd.
3 Comments
Police and community officers in Yorkshire, as almost certainly elsewhere, have by now fully internalized the Islamist message that a woman’s proper place is under a tent. Your evident disagreement as a private individual, even if you are Muslim, is quite irrelevant.
Your best shot is to get someone who can speak with authority on doctrinal issues in Islam — an “imam type” — to counter the Islamist message. Until then, it really isn’t absurd., and certainly multiculti oh so peecee public functionaries shouldn’t be taken to task for what they have been led to think must be in best interests of , um, “community outreach”.
Perhaps the cleric at the nearest mosque will oblige… No? Then not only is this not absurd, it’s a problem.
(Btw, I agree with you, but I’m a private individual too; and as for mere opinions, it’s said that they’re like assholes: everybody has one.)
It is absurd as well as a problem – and you are right, they won’t just listen to me – one individual. That’s why we need more people, imam, other Muslim women, whoever else to point out the insult, absurdity, and politics of Islamists.
One point of order, the two female Police (Debs Leonard and Pickering) appear to be Sergeants and not Constables as Houriya suggests. I wonder if they would submit to not being permitted to command male Constables for a day.
Even if they would, the idea that they’ve gained any insight into how [some] Muslim women feel when venturing onto the street wearing what their [confessional of] religion dictates would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. At the end of the day, they were free to disrobe and return to a [more or less] equal status in mainstream British society, and authority undreamt of by those SE Asian women they merrily patronized by this visit to a religious theme-park.
There’s no need for me to explain in which neck of the woods the burqa is a culturally-dictated more. Here is a local woman who did not wear a burqa and fought to ensure other women were not subjected to repression, and was assoassinated for her troubles. She was a Police officer as well; but, in my opinion, of far more smeddum than the Sgts Pickering and Leonard or PCSO Helen Turner.
In shameless self-publicity, I discussed another Muslim woman (who declines to let Muslim men chose which parts of Western culture pleased *them*, whilst requiring Muslim women to adhere to those parts of Islamic mandates which pleased *them*) here.
Here I doffed my snazzy felt fedora or Houriya, and touched upon the appearance of the burqa across the border from South Yorkshire in Lancashire. There’s a photograph of all three women: Turner is wearing a hijab, with Leonard and Pickering in burqas from left to right (although it may be right to left, I can’t tell).