Posted By Lisa Richards On November 16, 2010 @ 10:00 am
Americans have become subject to Peeping Tom airport X-ray scanners and full body groping. New TSA rules claim to prevent terrorists from blowing up airports and planes, but scanners won’t protect America from another 9/11. They will, however, violate travelers’ Fourth Amendment rights to be secure in their persons.
Americans should be up in arms over Superman X-ray vision machines: TSA scanners see the naked body through clothing. Libertarians at Lew Rockwell.com rightly condemn this unconstitutional violation, because, if one rejects full-body scans, one must be subjected to full body gropings many liken to rape. You won’t find conservative feminists like me disagreeing with that analysis. However, one Rockwell libertarian gallingly considers full-body scans more of a liberty infringement than Islamic burqas forcibly covering Muslim women from head-to-toe, never allowing Muslim women to be seen by any eyes.
Lew Rockwellians consider invasive scanners unconstitutional. Covering Muslim women in burqas is harmless compared to TSA scans. But both are violations: one abuses every person’s body and privacy; the other infringes women’s human and civil rights through Islamic slavery of women. Both should be condemned as abusively robbing freedom.
According to a column by William Norman Grigg at LewRockwell.com, the enslaving head-to-toe burqa is not as bad as Peeping Tom airport scans:
A small but passionate segment of the population is sick with worry over the incalculably small possibility that Muslims may someday force their daughters to wear burqas, yet indifferent to the fact that those same daughters can’t board a commercial flight without being virtually strip-searched or physically molested by a TSA functionary.
Grigg is correct, full body scans are unethical. Covering women under sheets is equally unethical.
Grigg can relax. Muslim women can board commercial flights without “virtual strip-searches,” and they won’t be “molested” by TSA gropers either, as NewsReal Blog’s Lori Ziganto explains. The TSA does not target Muslims:
Surely, you’d think, this wouldn’t be done randomly, but would rather be a targeted measure. And, you’d also think, certainly the absolutely random subjection of children to such ‘pat-downs’ wouldn’t occur. Well, you’d be wrong on both counts. Of course this isn’t targeted—that would be too profile-y and stuff! Because, tolerance. Or something. You see, because we must tolerate those who wish to kill us, we cannot offend them. We cannot be perceived to be singling out a certain group. We must, therefore, waste time and resources using terrorism countermeasures against, you know, NON-terrorists. And we are to pretend that 90-year-old grandmas from Nebraska flew planes into buildings on September 11th. Or that three-year-old girls strapped bombs to their shoes or in their underwear.
Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch reports that CAIR demands only non-Muslims be violated by TSA scanners, forbidding Muslim women from being scanned and strip-searched:
There are plenty of reasons to oppose naked body scanners and the recent groping incidents, but this response to them from Hamas-linked CAIR exposes its Islamic supremacist agenda like nothing else does. The scanners, and the whole TSA security apparatus, exists in the first place because of Islamic jihad terrorists, and now CAIR is demanding an exemption from such scanning for the very group from which comes the subgroup that made it necessary. In CAIR’s world, the one group that would be subjected to lighter airport security checks than any other group would be…Muslims. And that would in turn make things easier than ever for jihad terrorists. Surely that can’t be CAIR’s objective, now, can it?
CAIR wants Muslim women exempt from TSA scanners and pat-downs, but Islam won’t exempt women from enslaving burqas. This encroachment on liberty should have libertarians enraged.
Grigg doesn’t complain about infringements on Muslim women’s rights; rather, he insists America’s refusal to accept Islam and the Koran is Islamophobic and intolerant. Questioning the enslavement of women under sheets is intolerant; opposing a religion that subjugates women is called unjust.
Burqa covering should cause as much outrage as full-body scanners.
Rockwell writer William L. Anderson compares invasive scanners to rape:
One of the constant themes on any American college campus is ‘sexual assault.’ Men, for the most part, either are rapists or are preparing to become rapists, or are closet rapists. Women are helpless, forced into a form of sex slavery, forced to show their bodies, and forced to live in constant fear from sexually-perverted men. Furthermore, there is a whole cottage industry out there, complete with websites, which shout back this ideology to anyone who is in hearing distance.
Rockwell colleague Sibel Edmunds writes in “Not So Gradual Degradation of a Nation” that the full-body pat-down is the screener running his or her hands over women’s breasts, stomach, buttocks, inner thighs, and crotch area. Screener-groping intrudes upon the body just as the burqa intrudes upon freedom.
Naked-eye scanners are disgusting and do not prevent terrorism. The burqa is equally disgusting and dehumanizing. Both remove individual human and civil rights choices. Libertarians should regard Islam’s radical laws and TSA scanners and gropes equally. They do not and that view places America at risk, especially if Muslims are exempt from scans.
Targeting Islam, profiling Muslims, and refusing to accept Sharia Law and Islamic culture in America would help prevent terror, yet Grigg argues Islamic laws imposed on women and the West are not unethical. Really? How does Grigg view violent abuse of Muslim women dictated by Sharia Law? Is that liberty?
Americans should get angry at both: Superman vision airport scanners that see through clothing and burqas covering Muslim women from head-to-toe, never allowing them to be seen by any eyes. Both violate human and civil rights. We must reject both or lose all freedom.
Feminist Hawk
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