I'm sure other people have brought this up, but can we please keep the veil and the niqab separate in this discussion? A normal veil only covers a woman's hair and neck (although some don't even cover all of her hair and some are long enough to cover a woman's chest). Niqab covers a woman's face. And those big, ghost-like tents with the mesh that the Taliban made everyone wear? Burqa. Although burqa is sort of a broad ranging term throughout the Islamic world, too.

A veil in and of itself isn't really that offensive - it might be political, but it doesn't interfere with anyone's ability to communicate. Niqab, which is really very rare outside of Saudi Arabia and Iran, is what covers the face.

So, I just read Ms. Ridley's Op-Ed piece - what a load of halal baloney! My goodness, has she ever swallowed the Islamist apologist Kool-Aid in great big gulps! I've never seen such a fault-filled argument, and I have some very, very Republican relatives ("Honk if you love Rush!").

What I love about "Muslim feminists" (there are such things, but Ms. Ridley is certainly not among them) is when they try to imagine what the Qur'an and hadith REALLY mean. The screed about not beating your wife (or freeing your slaves) for instance - sure, Muhammad preached that it was a good idea to free slaves, and that if a man was going to beat his wife, he should use a toothbrush (miswak). These are attempts to temper violent and unfair behavior, but they are far from a ban on said behaviors. These are not out-and-out rejections of slavery or wife-beating, and to say that they are anything of the sort is a stretch. If The Qur'an or the Prophet had meant to say, "Don't beat your wife, stupid," it would have damn well been spelled out in black and white.

The idea that everything that Western women fought for within the last century (or, the 1970s, as Ms. Ridely put it) was already available to Muslim women for centuries is also really funny. Yeah? The right to vote? The right to drive somewhere on your own? The right to travel across international borders without a note of permission from your husband? The right to an abortion? The right to affordable birth control? The right to choose what you want to wear, when you want to wear it? If there was ever a time in which these rights were afforded to Muslim women (the driving one aside, I guess), I'd love to hear about it. It must have been a golden age, indeed.

Oh, good. See, one of my closest friends was born in Korea, but grew up with a loving adoptive family in a white town in the U.S. He feels American, and enjoys watching football, and doesn't even really like kimchi all that much.

I was worried that he felt like he belonged DESPITE any racism he may have encountered growing up. I now know that he shouldn't feel comfortable around people who don't look JUST LIKE HIM. I'll let him know right away that he should probably move back to Korea, because his life would have been better there, in an orphanage, without the best medical care and a fantastic family. Thank you, London Chic, for pointing that out.

Perhaps it's my Canuck upbringing, but I found it funny. Did anyone besides the humorless feminists read it? It's both parody and it's true (and it wouldn't be funny unless it wasn't true). I personally HATE food sculpture (and I think this is a quality that both women and gay men tend to share; see David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day).

I've been out with women who do the whole I-can-order-even-less-than-you-did, so that the last woman in line ends up consuming only a bottle of Perrier.

That's why it's funny. It may be tragic, but it's funny-tragic. I think Chris Rock did some great stand-up about how, if you want to go out to dinner and enjoy yourself, you should go out with a fat woman, because she'll order ribs (or whatever).

And I JUST KNEW some of you would write in with one of those "I'm thin and I always order an entire cow and eat it with my bare hands and men love me anyway because I'm beautiful and have really great metabolism". Shush.

Every religion has its share of nutjobs. Islam just happens to have more than its fair share, I guess. You don't have to be an apologist to see that the guy is off his rocker (with clearly no sense of self-preservation).

Of course, many men throughout the world believe this, Muslim or otherwise - I'd venture to say that many women do, too. It's sick, and it's sad, and it's uneducated, and it's tragic. But it's also a maniac shooting off his mouth, so stick it with your smug assertions about apologists and Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_El-Din_Hilaly

I'm actually angrier at the Australian government for not having him covertly killed by now. I'm all for the freedom of speech, but, this guy... this guy needs to be taken OUT.

"He has not since apologised nor retracted his comments, in which he accused Jews of causing all wars [11]."

Mel? Is that you, Mel?

info@lma.org.au

But you can email the mosque where Hilaly "preaches" and let them know that you find his rhetoric disgusting. I plan on doing so.

How many couples do I know who had kids to save their marriage, or to give the wife something to do, who are now divorced? Like, 3. I don't know that many couples, so that's saying something. LW might think that he marriage has been reinvigorated by the pregnancy, but if it was teetering before she had a screaming rugrat in her life, then it's not going to get any easier once the glow of pregnancy wears off.