In the Arena

Hair Shirt

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The geniuses over at the Commentary blog, taking a brief time out from their never-ending campaign to announce the Collapse of the House of Obama, have now locked onto the President’s support for the right of Muslim women to wear hejab (that is, a head scarf) and turned it into Obama support for the burqa, an awkward full-body outfit with an opaque birdcage covering the face, required by the more conservative Muslim leaders in Afghanistan. It turns out, some women don’t like to wear burqas! 

This is, of course, pure hair shirt. The President didn’t say anything about requiring anyone to do anything. He said that Muslim women who wanted to wear a head scarf shouldn’t be persecuted for it (a reference, one would suppose, to the infamous French statute banning such garb in schools). Of course, there are a significant number of Muslim women who actually do choose to cover themselves–Mir Hossein Mousavi’s wife, for example, is an ardent feminist who only appears in public in full chador (often with a lovely flowered hejab), even though the dress rules in Iran do not require her to do so. 

I’m sure this also means that the folks at Commentary are going to campaign for the rights of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women not to wear hats or wigs in public…right?