The Only Case Against The Burqa

The burqa and the niqab have been much in the UK news recently. According to a recent article in The Spectator, the burqa has been banned in Algeria, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chad, China, Denmark and France among others. France is said to have a general ban in public. The list goes on, with Afghanistan going against the grain and making it compulsory. For women, that is.

Should we ban it here? All manner of nonsense has been written and spouted about these face coverings - they are used to control women, and all that jazz. The burqa is simply a dress code as the amusing cartoon below illustrates.

But should these face coverings be banned? More to the point, should they be made compulsory for women like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown?

Seriously though, the only real issue with this kind of clothing is security, and we can illustrate this with two outrageous cases that did not involve Moslem women.

The two images below are poor quality screengrabs from CCTV cameras. The first shows Mary Konye. In January 2014, she was convicted at Snaresbrook Crown Court of throwing acid in the face of Naomi Oni. The two had been friends who worked together. Konye took umbrage at something Naomi said, and decided to scar her face permanently. This case generated enormous publicity at the time. She was given a sentence of 12 years, clearly not enough.

The second image shows a young woman named Christina Regusters who committed an even more shocking crime. In January 2013, disguising herself, the teenager posed as the mother of a 5 year old girl whom she abducted from a Philadelphia school. The following day, the poor girl was found nearly naked; she had been sexually violated - raped by instrumentation in legal speak. Jurors were said to have wept on hearing what she had done. Regusters was given a sentence of forty years to life for this unspeakable crime.

So should the burqa be banned? In the airport, for sure. Would a burqa ban really have prevented either of these terrible crimes? What do you think?