London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan declared an end to any kind of advertising in the city that promotes “unrealistic expectations of women’s body image and health,” or, in layman’s, typical Western-style fashion spreads.
Sharia, meet London.
As the Gatestone Institute notes, this reminds of when ISIS took over Sirte in Libya a couple years ago and immediately set up sharia shop, ordering via billboards for all women to don baggy burka’d robes if they wanted to walk in the streets without, say, getting acid thrown in their faces, or raped.
And it’s not just London.
In Berlin, where wave after wave of mostly Muslim migrant and refugee have swept away much of Germany’s tolerant culture, authorities are planning to implement a ban on images of women as “beautiful but weak, hysterical, dumb, crazy, naive or ruled by their emotions.”
Add Paris to the mix — Paris, city of romance-slash-sex, where nudity is practically a cultural norm — and it’s an alarming trend that’s sweeping Europe.
“Paris has said au revoir to ‘sexist’ ads on public billboards,” Gatestone reported. “The Paris city council announced its ban after the Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the move meant that Paris was ‘leading the way’ in the fight against sexism.”
What’s the common denominator? These cities have undergone radical demographic shifts in recent times, with major upticks in Muslim populations — Muslim populations that bring strict Islamic principles and beliefs.
Feminists and the hard left are either silent on these new fashion impositions, fearful and unwilling to buck the Islam tide, or worse, outright cheering, seeing such government-imposed bans as helpful in the fight to show women as powerful individuals, rather than objects of lust. But it’s a rather strange cheer to issue.
First off, it’s the left that’s promoted sex as a free-and-easy recreational activity — birth control as a woman’s equalizer with immoral men. It’s the left that’s tied female empowerment to showcasing one’s fairer sex self as alluring and seductive first, intelligent and capable, dim seconds and thirds.
But now that heavily Muslim-influenced and populated cities want to ban these same ads and images that the women of the left have fought so hard to label as empowering and liberating?
It’s not just ironic. It’s stupid.
It’s completely missing the point of the root of these bans — and the evil they promote.
“There is a reason for this grotesque campaign banning these images,” Gatestone goes on. “These cities host significant Muslim populations and politicians — the same who frantically are enacting mandatory multiculturalism — want to please ‘Islam.’ It is now a ‘feminist’ talking point to advocate sharia policy, as does Linda Sarsour. The result is that, today, few feminists dare to criticize Islam.”
Indeed.
This is not a campaign from smart women, sick of the objectifying that’s been embraced by even those of their own gender in recent times.
This is a government-imposed ban based on a rotten anti-freedom religion. And it should raise red flags all across the West. Sharia, whether subtly instituted or government-mandated, has absolutely no place in free societies, and must be fought in whatever form it comes.
First published at The Washington Times.
