Boris must be confronted for peddling fear and intolerance
THE smart thing to do would be to say absolutely nothing about Boris Johnson and his latest attempts to cause the deepest of offence to a particular community.
We’ve been here so often before and the bottom line is this: He’s doing it deliberately.
For attention, yes, but something a bit more sinister, too – relevance.
He was in danger of losing that after he resigned as foreign secretary, a job he was never fit for in the first place.
If you needed any proof of that, look no further than the fact it took him weeks after resigning to move out of his grace-and-favour townhouse.
No, Boris and his burka comments require dissecting because they represent yet another attempt to split our already-divided country.
Promoting fear and intolerance and suggesting that women who wear a veil are not only something other but something lesser is not new.
It’s not uniquely Boris. It’s a trope peddled by reactionaries – most often on the right but sometimes from the left – for decades. Everyone from Enoch Powell to Tommy Robinson could have said the same thing.
We would rightly call them racist for doing so but somehow we hold Boris to a different standard.
Is it because he’s posh? That the bigotry is somehow more tolerable because it comes with an Eton and Oxford underwriting?
He thinks it’s all got a bit out of hand. A jolly jape that can be placated by bringing cups of tea to the journalists and broadcasters standing at the gates of his house demanding answers.
Well, it’s not at all funny for the many Muslim women who walk our streets wearing hijabs, niqabs or even burkas – yes, there’s a difference, Boris, and you should learn it. Police are already reporting an increase in hate crimes towards the Muslim community.
Words like these are dangerous because they legitimise privately held views.
They make people more confident to verbalise in public what they think privately.
It leads to Muslim friends of mine being abused and shouted at in the street and feeling fearful on public transport. That’s not the type of country I want to live in.
Aside from the abuse it legitimises, Boris’s views also perpetuate a myth that exists across popular culture and our media: The idea that women wear a veil because they are told to do so, either by a husband, father, brother or a god.
It ignores the fact that for the vast majority of Muslim women, it is a choice. Something they choose for themselves.
Don’t believe me? Ask them yourself – because that’s the one thing that’s missing from the debate that’s raging across our papers: The voice of Muslim women.
We need to hear so much more from them in our public life and not just on questions of dress or religion.
Boris should be ignored but for as long as his words leave people feeling threatened, they have to be taken on and defeated.