Iona Italia is the sub-editor of Areo Magazine and we discussed this piece that she wrote about Sarah Jeong. 

*****

This is turning into a political correctness bumper edition, so sorry about that but I wanted to comment a bit about the controversy that blew up in the UK about Boris Johnson’s comment about Muslim women who wear burkas.

Boris Johnson, in case you don’t know, is the British conservative politician who resigned recently in protest that Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan wasn’t strong enough. Now, everything about Johnson’s behavior in regards to Brexit suggests that he has little or no principled beliefs on the matter and is just using it as a leverage to try to get himself into her job, but that’s a different story.

Johnson started a controversy when he said that women who wear the niqab or burka look like bank robbers or letterboxes.

Let’s be clear about terms here, by far the majority of Muslim women who wear headscarves wear a hijab, or something similar, which basically covers their hair and neck. Some go further and wear a niqab, which includes a veil which exposes only their eyes, and the most extreme, notably in Afghanistan under the Taliban, wear a burka, which even covers the eyes with a semi-transparent gauze.

It’s worth noting that women covering their hair is by no means confined to the Islamic world. It’s common in more traditional areas, like in Greece or Armenia – both Christian – for women to wear scarves in public. It’s pretty common in Russia too, particularly in more rural areas, and it would have been quite normal in Western Europe up to maybe 50 years ago, not to mention among Amish and other religious groups in the United States.

I have a couple of views about this. Firstly, for people in the west, I don’t like the idea of people wearing special clothes to mark out the fact that they are of a minority religion. I don’t confine that to Muslim women; the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro has defined the right of Muslim women to wear the hi...