Sometimes it can be a very tough job just to get a straight answer to a veiled question

SBS's Insight, September 21:

PRESENTER Jenny Brockie: Sheik Omran, you are the leader of an Islamic fundamentalist movement in Victoria, how central do you think the burka and the niqab are to being a Muslim woman?

Sheik Omram: First, I am not from Victoria. I am in Australia. Secondly, as Brother [Tariq] Ramadan talked about, this issue being for centuries, maybe Australians are a little bit unaware of it but they came to our countries, occupied our countries for hundreds of years -- we mixed with them for centuries. They know that it is not a new matter anyhow.

Brockie: How central is it -- how central is it wearing a niqab or a burka to be a Muslim woman?

Omram: I am going to answer that. Listen to me.

Brockie: I am just trying to get you to answer the question.

Omram: Yeah, but not in the way again. We are using either my way or the highway, we can't do that. We as Australians, I would say, come together in some values, and one of the values [is] we come to accept each other as we are. We don't have to be following the trail of Job, we are so far from Job anyhow, even some of their ancestors are Jobian but we are not Jobian any more. We are Australians and we have our identity and we should build our country according to that identity. Not according to the French or anyone else.

Paul Kent in Sydney's The Daily Telegraph, September 25:

"WHEN I put the scarf on," [Rebecca Kay] says, "I have never felt so beautiful in my whole, entire life." What a feeling it must be. Just last weekend a friend from her former home town of Kiama came to visit her at home in Bankstown. She noticed the scarf and couldn't help but ask. "But you're Australian," she said. "I know," she said. "But why are you Muslim for?" was the response. For many traditional Australians, the two are mutually exclusive. You cannot be both. It is part of the misunderstanding about Islam, muddied by extremists and ignorance and all the very worst behaviour there is in all of us but which we often refuse to admit. This is her religion. One for which some want the burka banned because they aren't like us.

More misunderstanding? What is a burka? From the Free Dictionary:

BURKA: a loose garment (usually with veiled holes for the eyes) worn by Muslim women especially in India and Pakistan: "The Taliban forced all women to wear the burka."

Brett Stephens argues with Matthew Kaminski in The Wall Street Journal, September 18:

OUR argument here reminds me of the old joke about a topless woman who walks into a church. The priest rushes up to her and says, 'Lady, you can't walk in here like that.' The woman says, 'But Father, I have a divine right.' The priest rejoins, 'You also have a divine left, but you still can't come in here like that.' Liberal Western societies are not churches or anything close, but guess what: you still can't walk topless down 5th Avenue without getting arrested for public indecency. I wager that might still be true even in Paris. We might define the rules of appropriate dress more broadly than the Vatican does, but we still have rules and sometimes we are required to enforce them. This is the common practice of free societies as we know them.

Emissions cut. Lachlan Kent in The Age on September 18:

TWO years ago, aged 27, I committed to a radical lifestyle choice. I had a vasectomy. I don't want my own biological children when there are already so many to go around. The prospect of an unsustainable world of nine billion people by about 2050 scares me to the core. The six billion we already have seems like way too many. My conviction behind the decision to have a vasectomy is therefore both private and political.

Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog diary on Friday:

AT least readers of The Age, circa 2040, will be spared reading the self-indulgent reflections of a Lachlan Kent Jr.

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