Let's make ALL the girls and women wear niqab, RIGHT?!

Now that I have your attention, my point is that Harper and the CPC are cravenly using the niqab to push hot buttons during this election.

The political cartoon above suggests the niqab issue will provide Harper with a "wind at his back" which he needs desperately needs to win the election race.

There are dozens of institutions that oppress women.  The niqab is the least of them but Harper's Attack Dingo™ Lynton Crosby has found one with formidable scaremongering OPTICS, right?

Susan Delacourt unpacks CPC doublespeak with regard to the niqab.

Rational people and critics of Harper's regime nail what the CPC tactic obfuscates:

This happened north of Ottawa last week. Basil Borutski 'allegedly' executed three women. How can this still occur, in Ontario, in 2015?

“Our systems need to try to pick out these warning signs sooner and do everything we can to provide safety and security,” [Illingworth] said. “There are absolutely gaps.”

The province’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, which works with the coroner’s office to review every domestic homicide in Ontario over more than a decade, has compiled a list of risk factors that “indicate the potential for lethality” within relationships or, to put it another way, a check-list to figure out the likelihood that an abuser will kill his partner.

Most of the boxes would be ticked off when it came to Borutski: a history of violence, an escalation of violence, obsessive behaviour, unemployment, isolation of victims and victims having an “intuitive sense of fear.”

From here:

Leighann Burns, the executive director of Ottawa women's shelter Harmony House, said many women feel that abusive men are not monitored closely enough after being released from jail, and that conditions placed on those who are released can, in some cases, easily be ignored.

"We hear from women routinely that the offences that men commit against them are not treated seriously in the criminal justice system," Burns said.

"Somebody who is lethally violent, who has clearly got no respect for the system or any sanctions that are meted out — there's not much that can be done, other than to lock him up or keep her hidden," she said.

So, probation officer are overworked, likely because of a large client load which, at the risk of provoking shrieks from Babs Kay, I will guess is 90% male offenders.

Remember Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti Shafia, 13, along with Rona Mohammad Amir, 50? Their bodies were found in the family’s Nissan, submerged in the Rideau Canal on June 30, 2009. The family members who killed them were able to "justify" their murders using the same twisted patriarchal ideology that motivated Borutski.  

Women "provoke" their murderers by defying the Gawd-given control entrusted to men to extract resources from women.  If women and girls refuse to provide men with what they want and demand, they're disposable.  They can be threatened, harmed, damaged, tortured and killed with impunity.  That chilling premise is the core of patriarchal extremism throughout the world.

So, the niqab? Just as oppressive as Harper's Hard-On Crime regime of venal liars who did NOTHING during their 9 years in government to make Canada safer for women and girls.


For a rueful chuckle to end my pessimistic rambling, check out my co-blogger's post about #CdnNiqab as well has the photos that folks posted on Twitter.