Women bear brunt of Islamophobia

[countryjake]

111. The fearmongering about ISIS was bound to bring out reactionaries...

with the MSM pounding the airwaves, daily, on this new improved YouTube "terror" and governments conducting raids all over the world to root out such "barbarians" (didn't Australia have one recently, breaking down doors in the night?)...it's a sad result that anyone's chosen spirituality or even the scarf they wear could leave them vulnerable to attack.

Civil rights in nations who claim to hold such things in high regard become the real casualties.

When I was a kid, living in an area that had many who practiced an old order Christian sect, an especially younger girl in my school made the decision to get baptized and become a member of her family's religion. The gossip swirled around and my school became an unusually hostile environment for that fourteen year old, mainly because others of her church never chose to don the bonnet until they were married and out of school. She was smart, respected, and a good friend to quite a few of us, so we got together one Friday evening under the bleachers at a football game and plotted a response to the hateful bigotry she was suffering. Come Monday morning, probably half of the girls in that school walked in wearing their own "borrowed" bonnets and we literally dared anyone to mock us or dish out any of the kerap that our friend had experienced for her choice. It took about a week but our method worked, opening minds, and the girl got her education wearing the garb of her religion, free of most of the previous discrimination, and she graduated as the salutatorian of her class.

I still have the little white bonnet that my best friend lent me for that solidarity protest fifty years ago.