A woman who used to wear a hijab, was forced into it by her husband, but is now free and is promoting No Hijab Day. I show you first how the CBC is enforcing World Hajab Day by trying to get some guy fired who mildly criticized it. And then we'll talk to a woman who was forced to wear the hijab by her former husband but now has a free hijab.
00:04:37.360And for a couple years before that, he had other pro-refugee positions, including volunteer coordinator.
00:04:42.240So this guy would literally go around Red Deer, Alberta, and tell people they should come and work for free to help integrate refugees into Canada.
00:05:07.380Well, getting them jobs, getting them housing, getting them into schools, having them learn English, just showing them how to live and work in Canada, how to dress in the cold, how to use our banking system, stuff like that.
00:05:18.800But you see, he wrote something on Facebook in 2017.
00:05:44.760What a good and, at the same time, difficult topic to bring up for discussion.
00:05:50.280Indeed, where is the line in the sand on welcoming and accepting people and immigrants making concessions on adapting and, in some ways, conforming to the new country they find themselves in?
00:22:03.640Which is why she can so reliably be called upon by Justin Trudeau to do hit pieces on normal Canadians who don't like burqas and don't like mass, unvetted Muslim migration from terrorist-soaked countries like Syria.
00:22:21.360I've never seen her support moderate Muslims, by the way.
00:22:24.020She just loves the cotters of the world.
00:22:25.580Look at this insane fake news story from just last week.
00:24:51.920Well, if you are anywhere near the corporate media, the social media, you can't miss it.
00:24:57.920Today is World Hijab Day, where the Muslim head covering, sometimes it also is a face covering in the form of a niqab or a burqa,
00:25:10.600is celebrated and promoted, including from secular liberal leftists who should know better.
00:25:17.320Well, in an opposition to World Hijab Day is No Hijab Day, and in particular, many liberal Muslims or ex-Muslims protest against that face obscuring veil or hair obscuring veil that they once were forced to wear.
00:25:33.660Joining us now live via Skype is one such No Hijab Day activist, our friend Yasmeen Mohamed, author of Confessions of an Ex-Muslim.
00:25:43.040Great to see you again, Yasmeen. Welcome back to the show.
00:25:46.040Thank you so much for having me, Ezra.
00:25:47.480Now, World Hijab Day typically refers to the hair covering, which obscures all the hair on the head.
00:25:54.860Does it also include the face obscuring niqab or chador or burqa or some of those other phrases?
00:26:02.460Yeah, we generally refer to all of that as hijab because you can't wear the face covering without also the hair covering.
00:26:11.460So when we're talking about No Hijab Day, we're talking about no any prescribed modesty clothing that are forced upon women against their will.
00:26:22.120You know, it's amazing to me to watch women, particularly in Iran, where they seem to be really chafing against these restrictions put on them by the regime.
00:26:31.780You see women standing in public, holding their hijab on a stick.
00:26:35.940I see social media clips all the time of women being confronted by the mutawin, the religious police, and pushing back.
00:27:04.920So meanwhile, while women in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq and Kuwait and Egypt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, are fighting for their right to be able to wear what they want without their government, societies, or families forcing any clothing upon them.
00:27:19.260Meanwhile, over here in the West, we have free women putting hijabs on their heads in World Hijab Day.
00:27:25.880So non-Muslim women are being encouraged to wear this.
00:27:28.780They set up booths across different universities and college campuses, as well as different government buildings.
00:27:36.460And they bring hijabs with them, and they encourage non-Muslim women to wear the hijab for a day.
00:27:41.720So instead of encouraging more people to wear this, what No Hijab Day is talking about is allowing women to take it off if they want to take it off and letting them make that choice.
00:27:55.460I hear some arguments, and it's clever, from pro-hijab activists who say, well, why are you telling women what they can't wear?
00:28:06.960You're just as bad as the ayatollahs if you're saying no hijabs, you're bossing women around, too.
00:28:14.200Can you speak to the thesis put by such people that covering up, especially, I mean, I was just reading the other day about a woman in Australia, and they're having a real heat wave there right now.
00:28:27.900I mean, it's like 40 degrees Celsius on what it's like to be outside in Australia in 40-degree heat in a black body bag.
00:28:35.640And, you know, the idea that this would be a voluntary choice, I find hard to believe, but this is the argument of some.
00:29:10.940I mean, the humidity there, and then they're covering their faces in black fabric as well.
00:29:15.680So it's dehumanizing, it's oppressing, and it can actually be dangerous for their health as well.
00:29:22.960And to speak to your earlier point about asking women to take off the hijab, I would never do that.
00:29:31.540Because I myself, when I chose to take off the hijab, I was threatened with death by my family.
00:29:36.860And as you know, Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year-old girl in Mississauga, Ontario, was killed by her family, strangled by her father, because she refused to wear the hijab.
00:29:46.000So I would never ask women to take off their hijabs, because I know how dangerous that decision would be.
00:29:53.580So that just speaks to how we cannot have opposing protests.
00:29:58.220Their protest is saying, put on a hijab.
00:30:00.800I can't say, take off a hijab, because I know that there are women that could potentially be killed for that.
00:30:06.560So what I'm saying instead is, I support those women.
00:30:10.240I support the women that would be in danger of being abused, tortured, imprisoned, or killed for taking off the hijab.
00:30:18.560And these women, of course, are Muslim women.
00:30:21.920These are Muslim women that are fighting their own societies, that are fighting the patriarchy within their own families, within their own communities, and that want to have the freedom to live.
00:30:32.220Of course they want to have the freedom to live life freely.
00:31:01.080Either the threat of violence, or at the very least the threat of being expelled from their mosque, the community, even from their husband's home.
00:31:10.820So the idea that they're making a voluntary choice while under duress, we in the West have the concept that you can't agree to something if you don't have free will.
00:31:20.420If you're forced to sign a contract with a gun to your head, that's not genuinely your will.
00:31:28.480And the argument I heard was, if you were to ban the burqa, what you actually do is you empower those 77% of women to say to the bullies in their life,
00:31:38.680who are invariably men, to say, look, you know, I'd like to do that, but I can't, because the police say I can't.
00:32:05.720But at the end of the day, when you talk about the violence that these women could be subjected to,
00:32:10.900yes, there is violence that could happen to them here by their husbands, by their fathers, etc.
00:32:15.760But then there's also the threat of burning in hell for eternity.
00:32:20.540So even if you remove the threats here on Earth, these women who are indoctrinated are still going to be feeling like they could potentially burn in hell for the rest of eternity.
00:32:31.620Now, to talk about the indoctrination a little bit, you have to realize that this is put on children.
00:32:39.440And then when you grow up as an adult and you decide to take it off, you don't get that choice.
00:32:45.960So there's really, when we talk about choice, that means you have the choice to put it on and you have the choice to take it off.
00:32:51.740And as we know from just, I mean, a quick Google search will show you how many women are imprisoned, killed, tortured, abused, stoned.
00:33:02.700All sorts of horrible things happen to women who take it off.
00:33:05.540In fact, in the United Kingdom, there's a Muslim woman by the name of Dina Tokio and she is a model and she's a hijabi model and she's decided to take off the hijab.
00:33:17.020And the amount of filth and violence and threats that have been thrown in her direction, she has a video on YouTube where she does nothing but just read the hate.
00:33:25.640And that video is almost an hour long.
00:33:49.360And what they, the first time I heard that phrase was, hey, workers of the world, when you're happy in this capitalist system, that's false consciousness.
00:33:58.940You're just being taught to be happy with material goods and your place in the economy.
00:34:02.940You should think of yourself as Marxist proletariat.
00:34:06.960Don't be lulled into this happy dream by false consciousness that you're part of the capitalist economy.
00:34:12.680That's the first time I heard the phrase false consciousness.
00:34:15.920It's people saying you're not really happy.
00:35:12.120You just start to convince yourself because that you, because you don't see another option.
00:35:16.280I actually wanted to tell you a little story to, to support your hypothesis there last year during world hijab day at a university, there was a booth set up where a girl was trying to get a non-Muslim woman to wear the hijab and the non-Muslim woman refused.
00:35:32.920She said, no, I don't want to wear that.
00:35:35.640And there are women that are being imprisoned and killed for wearing that.
00:35:38.980Why would I actively put that on my head?
00:35:42.300And so the girl, the Muslim girl that was trying to force it on the non-Muslim girl cried Islamophobia and, in fact, tried to get that girl expelled.
00:35:51.900They had a petition going online and they had this big Twitter, you know, pile on where they were trying to get that young student expelled.
00:37:05.780Give our viewers who are also fans an update on some of your successes in the last few months.
00:37:11.140Well, you know, Rahaf Mohammed Al-Khanoun, who just came into Toronto, took up a lot of this past month of mine because everybody's been really excited about her coming into Canada.
00:37:21.720And she's the young girl who escaped from Saudi Arabia, who was barred in the, in the hotel in Thailand.
00:37:29.360And also now Asya Bibi is coming to Canada.