Another letter about Islam, hinting the editors get it, printed under the headline above....
Other points about the burka: (1) many women wear them as result of peer pressure or pressure of male relatives. Many Muslima are happy that a law will help them overcome that pressure. (2) Wearing the burka is a sign of orthodoxy. Orthodox Islam is the violent Islam, for violence is central to the tenets of its doctrines. (3) If a woman says she's happy to wear the burka, that's just a form of Stockholm syndrome. There were many slaves at a loss, when they had to throw off their shackles. "But we liked our chains, we were used to them"...
Letter from W. Puccetti, in today's South China Morning Post:
Muslims practise double standards
I refer to the article ("Liberte, egalite, fraternite?", April 13).
I cannot understand why some organs of the press are chastising the French government for insisting on public secularism regardless of whether one is Christian, Jewish or Muslim. The new law against the "public" wearing of the niqab or the burqa is demonised in certain media as an attack on people's civil liberties and, somehow, racist.
I have lived and worked in the Middle East and I know how my Western women colleagues were harassed endlessly by the authorities if they wore skirts even slightly below [sic - "below"?] the knee on the grounds that "this is a Muslim country and we expect Western women to respect our customs". I know of cases where Western women resigned rather than accept that they were behaving "immodestly".
One of the Muslim women in France who was protesting is quoted as saying that she staged a peaceful protest for the right "to dress as they please". It seems to me that the credo of Islamists is: "When in my country do as I say. When I am in your country do as I say."
Walter Puccetti, Tin Shui Wai
