Muslim Woman Tries To Convince People Forcing Women To Wear Hijab Is Cool

Dalia Mogahed, formerly Barack Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, appeared on Trevor Noah’s sinking-like-a-stone Daily Show last week, to explain to a worshipful Noah and an adoring audience that the hijab represented nothing more or less than the “privatization of women’s sexuality” – and who on earth but the most benighted lout could possibly be against that? The burning outrage of Mogahed’s words was probably missed by most Daily Show viewers. It should not be missed by FrontPage readers.

“The privatization of women’s sexuality.” A well-constructed and extraordinarily clever phrase, to be sure. With it, Mogahed suggests that the only people who could possibly object to women wearing hijabs are those who want to objectify women as sexual commodities. In this, we glimpse the subtle manipulation by which Islamic supremacists such as Mogahed have co-opted and silenced feminists whom one might otherwise have expected to have stood up against the Sharia oppression of women. How can one stand with the objectifiers, the pornographers, the users, the haters, against those who simply want to “privatize” their sexuality?

The audience loved this. Noah ate it up. But there are a few audiences before whom Mogahed’s extremely clever act might not play quite as well as it did before the Daily Show. Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Aqsa might have a few choice words for Dalia Mogahed about “privatization” of her sexuality. And then there was Amina Muse Ali, who was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab. They might wish that their sexuality had been a trifle less “privatized” – at least enough for them to be able to continue to breathe air.