Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, described Sports Illustrated‘s featuring of a model wearing a burkini and hijab as left-wing “insanity” that glorifies an Islamist “honor culture,” offering his remarks on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
“I think it’s an insanity where sort of mainstream folks — or however you want to identify them — [in] Hollywood and the left use Muslims as this sort of identity checkbox,” said Jasser. “If you look at the rationale of having a swimsuit edition that has a model that’s dressed in a burkini, it just doesn’t make sense no matter which way you look at it.”
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Jasser continued, “It’s a point to please the fundamentalists — the Salafists — who don’t believe in and don’t accept the objectification of women. If that’s true, they’re not going to be reading that magazine, and that burkini and having that model in that edition still objectifies her, and it doesn’t even really fit the description of a what a burkini should b, because you can still see her body’s shape.”
“Even women I know in our community that are conservative and believe in modest dress are offended by that objectification,” shared Jasser.
Jasser stated, “If you’re on the left and you believe in women’s rights and equality and no limitations of dress, which is part of the modern movement of the #MeToo generation. It really makes no sense. They’re actually empowering an image of hijab and control of women’s bodily clothing, which is against Western ideas. So Sports Illustrated has allowed itself to glorify the hijab, glorify this honor culture or purity culture of Islamists, and somehow that’s supposed to be a good thing. … It’s a huge contradiction for the left.”
Jasser determined, “Our pop culture seems to be completely backwards in its principles. If this is about women’s freedom and equality, this is not the way to get there.”
“It proves that their attention to Muslim issues is simply them being the victims,” deduced Jasser of left-wing interest in Muslims. “It’s simply them trying to absolve themselves of the guilt that the know they have, which is a guilt of bigotry of low expectations, of exploitation of Muslims for their own sort of identity politics, and you see them do this with every minority group that they claim to take under their wing. They ignore what’s happening internally.”
Jasser noted the political alliance between left-wing and Islamist persons and groups.
“If you see why the Islamists take the side of Maduro, there’s a red-green axis, globally,” remarked Jasser. “I call it the red-green axis, which is the axis between the fascists of socialist regimes and the Islamists. You see them work at the UN where they say America is the evil satan, and Israel is the little satan, and they end up focusing half the UN’s work on anti-American and anti-Israel stuff, and that’s because of the lobby of the red-green axis in the UN.”
“They simply want to use it for their identity politics,” concluded Jasser of the left’s ostensible advocacy for Muslims’ welfare
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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