Democratic Congressman Luis Correa has hung a painting on his office wall depicting the Statue of Liberty dressed in a hijab.
Rep. Correa (D-CA) said the image represents “a young Muslim lady who is trying very hard to be part of America, who is trying very hard to show people that she is an American”.
The artwork drew the ire of local campaigners We The People Rising who said: “He shouldn’t have anything religious in his office. … I would like to see our Congress people be right-down-the-line patriotic.”
Rep. Correa may not realise, but Lady Liberty was actually fashioned on an Egyptian woman in the 1850s. And guess what? She has no hijab.
Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s designer, visited Nubian monuments at Abu Simbel on what would one day become the banks of Lake Nasser, in 1855. He wanted the statue to be a “colossal goddess”, to stand at the Suez Canal while the nation’s leader at the time — Isma’il Pasha — was embarking on a programme of Europeanization. He even stated, in 1879: “My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions”.
And since we have mentioned Gamal Nasser, it is worth noting the former Egyptian leader is commonly remembered for his rejection of a Muslim Brotherhood demand for all women to cover up with a veil. In this video, he and his colleagues laugh at the idea, with one audience member shouting his recommendation for the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Let him wear it!”
Indeed mass rejections of the veil have been seen across the Muslim world and still are. For Rep. Correa to blindly associate it with young Muslim women without an acknowledgement of the coercive factors as well as oppressive elements is wholly morally and historically bankrupt. It also flies in the face of the progressive agendas of the likes of Pasha. So much for the Democrat Party being of the progressive left.
We haven’t even mentioned the 100,000 Iranian women who protested against the hijab in 1979.
What about the women in Syria who this year celebrated their liberation from the Islamic State by pulling their burkas and niqabs off their heads and attempting to set fire to them?
I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised about Rep. Correa, given the Democrat Party’s recent fealty to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and other Islamic groups.
I used the Statue of Liberty in a burka as the front cover of my book as a warning to America and the Western world. Congressman Luis Correa appears to think it’s not such a bad idea. In the words of the Muslim Brotherhood heckler in that Egyptian audience in 1958: let him wear it.
Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of Breitbart London and author of No Go Zones: How Sharia Law is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You
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