From the Telegraph and the Danish edition of The Local.
A 28-year-old woman wearing a niqab on Friday became the first person in Denmark to be fined for violating a new controversial law banning full-face Islamic veils in public places, media reported.
Police were called to a shopping centre in Horsholm, in the northeastern region of Nordsjaelland, where the woman had become involved in a scuffle with another woman who had tried to tear her niqab off, police duty officer David Borchersen told the Ritzau news agency.
“During the fight her niqab came off, but by the time we arrived she had put it back on again,” Borchersen said.
Police took a photograph of the woman wearing the niqab, and obtained security camera footage from the shopping centre of the incident. The woman was informed she would receive a fine of 1,000 kroner (£119) in the post, and was told to either remove her veil or leave the public space. “She chose the latter,” Borchersen said.
The ban came in on Wednesday (1st August) but police didn’t arrest or have fined the faceless protestors in Copenhagen that day.
Marching from Superkilen to the police station in Bellahøj, hundreds of protesters violated the ban by covering their faces. A spokesman for the Copenhagen police said they did not plan to fine the protesters, AFP reported on Wednesday.
“I refuse to take off my niqab because I refuse to bow down to oppression,” Sabina, a niqabi woman who was participating in the protest, told The Local. “I chose to wear niqab a couple years ago as a very spiritual choice. I did it for the sake of God and a way for me to connect with God. It is a part of my faith and a part of my identity,” Sabina said. “This ban is discriminating, oppressing and is built on Islamophobia,” the 21-year-old, who preferred not to disclose her full name, said.
.jpg)
Whining Muslima (her sign translates as Liberal hypocrisy) and liberal useful idiots in Nørrebro last week.
Hani Ali, another niqabi woman, told The Local that the ban would restrict her freedom of movement. “I am going to try to live my life as normally as I can. Of course, it is going be difficult, there are places that I cannot go to any more but I’ll just have to make a sacrifice for what I believe is true,” Ali said. “I will hope that we can change the climate or the narration of what a Muslim woman is and maybe they will change the law or subtract it someday,” It won’t restrict her movements at all; she should just remove the veil and operate according to the customs of the country in which she has chosen to live.
After the government proposed the ban to the parliament in February, Justice Minister Søren Pape Poulsen said in a statement that the face veil is “incompatible with the values in Danish society and disrespectful to the community.”
- Like
- Digg
- Del
- Tumblr
- VKontakte
- Buffer
- Love This
- Odnoklassniki
- Meneame
- Blogger
- Amazon
- Yahoo Mail
- Gmail
- AOL
- Newsvine
- HackerNews
- Evernote
- MySpace
- Mail.ru
- Viadeo
- Line
- Comments
- Yummly
- SMS
- Viber
- Telegram
- Subscribe
- Skype
- Facebook Messenger
- Kakao
- LiveJournal
- Yammer
- Edgar
- Fintel
- Mix
- Instapaper
- Copy Link
3 Responses
From the article – “Marching from Superkilen to the police station in Bellahøj, hundreds of protesters violated the ban by covering their faces. A spokesman for the Copenhagen police said they did not plan to fine the protesters..”.
They should have. They should have mustered overwhelming numbers and arrested the lot of them and fined the lot of them. And they should have had the riot squad and the army on call to arrest any male mohammedan mobsters who tried to gin up a riot in response to the arrests.
These face-masked mohammedan females – proudly flaunting their slave-mask/ Allah Gang uniform in public – are no different from the fare-jumpers that were flouting the law in NYC’s subways; and I’ll *bet* that if they had been – all of them – arrested, and fingerprinted, and *sniffed by sniffer dogs trained to detect illegal drugs, and explosives, and precursors thereof** and if they had been *searched*, who knows what might have been discovered?? For that matter: what if their fingerprints and dna samples were run through the unsolved-crimes databases? What if their immigration/ residency/ asylum status and welfare records were *thoroughly* scrutinised? How many might be discovered to be in Denmark illegally, or to have gained entry / residency under false pretences? Are they all who they say they are? Further… if they *were* all unmasked.. I wonder whether some of them would have turned out **not to be women at all but, rather, MEN**?? These Allah Gang camp followers are, so to speak, a loose end… or a trailing bit of fuse wire… grab it and pull and see what is attached to the other end.
Sabina says that the niqab is “part of her identity.” Isn’t this an oxymoron? Part of her identity is covering her identity? OK, got it. But what’s the other part of her identity? A faceless activist for women’s rights? A faceless campaigner against FGM, child marriage, so-called honour killings? Does her “spiritual choice” include the fighting of such abuses directed at females. Perhaps we don’t associate niqab-wearers with such activism (I wonder why that is?) but if just by chance she was moved to so direct her efforts, would the niqab-clad face be up to the job? Without a face, her name won’t be memorable; without a face, she is just one of a group. When wearing a niqab she forgoes her individual identity and assumes a group identity, that of “niqab-wearers.” While she’s wearing her niqab, any observer can reasonably conclude that the wearer is Muslim, but cannot even be sure that the wearer is female (as Christina McIntosh points out in her comment). While out in public with her face covered, Sabina’s personal identity is subsumed to the larger group. It’s all so liberating it makes my head spin. But, on second thought, perhaps she’s right—Islam suppresses individual freedoms, so that’s her identity after all: a faceless person to whom Islam, a stultifying belief system, is paramount. And her protests about discrimination and oppression ring hollow: she should try entering Mecca posing as a Christian, or walking in Tehran with her hair uncovered, or having a friendly meeting with the Taliban in Afghanistan to impress upon them the importance of education for girls. Denmark might seem a tad more enlightened after those encounters. (Wish I could insert paragraphs into these comments, but they always disappear.)
“I refuse to take off my niqab because I refuse to bow down to oppression.”
Delightfully pious, wickedly twisted.