POPULAR
AMERICAN COMEDIAN BORIS JOHNSON is once again in the news, and although I had
more or less decided to abandon writing on this blog there are events which
have a mysterious ability to attract me to the keyboard as long as I have time.
THE LAST TIME
SUCH an event took place was when equally popular American television
entertainer Donald Trump cleared dandruff from bemused French president
Macron's shoulder, but this time it is the kerfuffle surrounding what Boris
Johnson wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph. Even this morning, the
19th of August, people are still arguing in television debates over whether Johnson should be
punished for something he wrote two weeks ago.
JOHNSON IS FAR
TOO FLY to "state" rather than infer his views, and an intelligent
readership should judge on what is in fact written, something which none of the
commentators I have read or heard have done; as if, in fact, they have not read the
column.
JOHNSON criticises Denmark for joining France,
Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Chechnya, Belgium, Chad, Cameroon, Congo and
Niger in banning burkas and niqabs. He quite correctly states that, in his
opinion, women should not be told what to wear.
HERE IS WHERE
I THINK many of the flea-brained leftie politicians have misunderstood the
intelligence of Johnson's writing: I would perhaps be prepared to suggest that
a good many young women -- one of them was interviewed yesterday on the BBC --
do not wish to wear the burka, but are forced to do so by their fathers and are
often punished cruelly for not obeying the male members of the family. That is, of course, that many women who wear the burka have been told what to wear and what not to wear -- due to the obscure and unfounded religious beliefs of the men in their families.
Mr Johnson´s "joke" about letter boxes is obviously
tongue-in-cheek. And he does not say that Muslim women look like letter boxes,
merely that it is ridiculous for someone to "choose to look like a letter
box" and that if a female student turned up for a lecture looking like a
bank robber this would cause alarm. As a lecturer I must agree with him.
(My photographs show a letter box -- not a post
box -- a bank robber and Boris Johnson with Donald Trump, in order to aid
clarity on the issue.)
