A longish article about the insanity that temporarily gripped America when they considered putting an ordinary athlete as flag bearer at the olympics opening, simply because she wore a hijab.
And now she's being feted. Is America mad?
.... most sadly of all, this is just another example of the moral illusion the Western Left repeatedly keeps falling for.Rather than celebrate well integrated Muslims who've adopted modern liberal values, they choose to celebrate the religiously conservative, and then think they are being progressive in doing so.Meanwhile other women of Muslim background such as the 400 metre hurdler Dalilah Muhammad, who chooses to wear standard attire for her event, won't get a mention. Inadvertently this just reinforces the Muslim Brotherhood idea of the 'authentic' Muslim voice only being the one wearing a Hijab, whose politics aligns with narratives of victimisation and despair in the West (Muhammad complains of feeling 'unsafe all the time' in the US and remarked that if elected Mitt Romney would 'ship us all of to Afghanistan) and a hatred of Israel expressed in the most hyperbolic terms (Muhammad accuses them of 'ethnic cleansing' etc).Why can't those who want to support Muslim women champion instead genuinely liberal progressive voices such as Habiba Ghribi, [SA1] the 2012 Olympic Steeplechase champion from Tunisia, who after winning her medal dedicated it to the women's right movement in her home country who were at the time fighting to change women's constitutional status from 'complementary' to that of 'equal', and has since become a hero to women's rights activists there.
