Thank You Cameron for Using Another Stick to Beat Muslim Women With

David Cameron’s comments on the need to teach Muslim women English are racist and Islamophobic coming amid already growing intolerance and violence towards Muslim women in Europe.

Only last year we saw a Muslim woman in hijab being punched and kicked off a London bus; a Muslim woman being shoved into an oncoming train; a Muslim woman being doused in alcohol; a Muslim woman having her hijab ripped off.

These are only the ones we have seen on mainstream news. There are hundreds of incidents that haven’t been covered by mainstream news, incidents that we have heard through the community or through personally knowing someone (which is also becoming increasingly common).

Growing hate towards Islam and Muslims has had Muslim women paying the price. To put the icing on the cake Cameron wows us with his new brand of Islamophobia and racism. I call it Islamophobic and racist for the following reasons:

Let me first ask the question: Why does Cameron only mention Muslim women as needing to integrate and learn English. Don’t the thousands of women from other faiths also need to integrate through learning English? I cannot count the number of times I have helped women from other faiths asking for directions from one place to another using sign language and broken gestures. Why only pick on Muslim women? Because it’s easier to join the Islamophobic-bashing-Muslim-women-bandwagon in order to push your policies that otherwise no one would listen to?
Why only target women at all? Where did the men go? Shakespearean finishing school?
Segregation is not what’s allowing forced marriages and genital mutilation to exist. Victims of forced marriages and genital mutilation are not isolated due to language barriers but are victims of their culture, circumstance and their own personal barriers. Also it is generally accepted that there is no link between genital mutilation and religious belief. So to claim teaching Muslim women English will somehow counter these factors, is not only stupid, but Islamophobic by implying this is a Muslim problem, when it is a cultural problem.
Do you want to know what really contributes to isolation? Discrimination towards Muslims, Islamophobic attacks on them, prejudice towards their way of life and white supremacists looking down their noses at these ‘poor,’ ‘oppressed’ Muslim women. And this fear of Islamophobia is what makes me wary of leaving home. Why doesn’t Cameron invest 20m to tackle that?
“Vulnerability to recruitment by so-called Islamic State”. This is rich coming from a guy who doesn’t acknowledge foreign policy as a root cause of terrorism that created Islamic state in the first place. And then decides to bomb Syria.
Extremism has no language Cameron.
Will these English classes include the chavs in the EDL? Maybe we need to replace their ‘Muslamic rayguns’ with English grammar? Certainly an education will be in order.
Do we have special enrollment for the right wing media who don’t know the meaning of ‘biased,’ ‘hate’ and ‘Islamophobic’?
Why don’t all expats living abroad learn their host country’s language?
Learn an ‘immigrant’ language Cameron. Maybe it will help you learn not to be such an uptight white supremacist.

If you really want to tackle isolation of Muslim women Cameron, then how about doing some of this: invest to tackle Islamophobia by teaching Islam and Arabic at schools, ban groups like the EDL and Britain First, monitor kids at school who are Islamophobic towards their peers and put them in anti-extremism programmes, consider taking children away from parents who are Islamophobic (God knows how they are brainwashing their kids), review anti-terrorism laws in light of increasing evidence they are discriminatory towards the Muslim community, acknowledge Western foreign policy as a root cause of terrorism, stop bombing Syria, listen to the Muslim community when it tells you how bulls*** Prevent is. هل تفهم? entiendes? کیا تم سمجھ گئے ہو? क्या आप समझे, comprenez vous? D’ya gets meh? Do you understand?

This isn’t about tackling isolation, but about blaming Muslims for extremism. And as usual the most vulnerable in society, Muslim women, get the harshest stick.