Why the Aussie burqa stunt has got under the woke’s skin

Australian senator Pauline Hanson has landed herself a one-week suspension from parliament after showing up on Monday dressed in a burqa.

The stunt (which Hanson had already pulled once before, back in 2017) was a protest against the rejection of her bill that would ban full-face coverings in Australia. This is a policy that Hanson’s staunchly anti-immigration party, One Nation, has long campaigned for.

‘This is a racist senator, displaying blatant racism’, cried Mehreen Faruqi, a Muslim senator who is also deputy leader of the Australian Greens. Independent senator Fatima Payman described Hanson’s behaviour as ‘disgraceful’. Australia foreign minister Penny Wong, who on Tuesday moved a motion to formally censure Hanson, accusing her of ‘parading prejudice as protest for decades’.

Hanson is, undeniably, a provocateur. In 1996, in a speech before the House of Representatives, she claimed Australia was at risk of being ‘swamped by Asians’. By 2016, she appeared to have narrowed down the threat, claiming in her maiden speech to the senate that Australia was instead about to be ‘swamped by Muslims’. Immigration and census data suggest her alarmism is totally unfounded.

What’s more, Hanson is also appealing a judgement from last year which found her guilty of racial discrimination against Faruqi, the aforementioned Greens senator. Suffice it to say, the label of ‘divisive figure’ has been well earned in Hanson’s case.

Yet none of this quite accounts for the ferocity of the backlash to Hanson’s protest on Monday. Wong’s motion, which passed 55 votes to five, claims Hanson’s actions were ‘intended to vilify and mock people on the basis of their religion’ – a curious conclusion, given Hanson’s ‘crime’ was to have shown up to work in an item of clothing her opponents want people to be free to wear where they please.

Claims that her protest was ‘racist’ don’t quite hold water, either. Islam is not a race. On the contrary, it considers itself a universal religion, even to the extent that some hardliners believe all humans are born Muslim (but are simply corrupted by, say, atheism or other religious faiths). Nor is the burqa considered mandatory throughout Islam – women are only legally obliged to wear it in the Muslim world’s most repressive theocracies.

It’s not hard to see why Hanson’s stunt has got under progressives’ skin. After all, they must recognise, on some level, that being simultaneously in favour of women’s rights while refusing to criticise any aspect of Islam – including its most ultra-conservative, fundamentalist expressions – requires a 2+2=5 kind of thinking. Cries of ‘racism’ are merely a product of the mental meltdown that occurs when so-called liberals are forced to confront their own cognitive dissonance.

We all instinctively know why seeing a woman draped head to toe in black – with a single strip of gauze over the eyes so she isn’t fumbling around blind – makes us feel uneasy. We also know the reason why there were no actual burqa-wearing members of the Australian senate present to tell Hanson how personally offended they were – and why there are no high-ranking burqa-wearing officials in any country’s government (not even in those where the garment is mandatory). Because enforced covering of this kind always goes hand-in-hand with deep-seated misogyny.

You don’t have to favour a ban on the burqa to see some value in Pauline Hanson’s parliamentary stunt. Indeed, the truly liberal position is to oppose a ban on the burqa, while arguing vehemently against it. Nevertheless, Hanson has done us all a service in lifting the veil on the moral inconsistencies of the woke. If wearing the burqa is merely ‘a choice’, then why can’t she choose to wear it? And if we’re offended by the sight of someone wearing it, then why can’t we say why?

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.