Will your daughters play with "Burka Barbie"?

Here's my latest column in the Sun:

Time to face facts on burkas

Some 54% of Canadians want to ban the burka, the head-to-toe shroud worn by a tiny minority of Muslim women in the West, but the common dress in medieval backwaters like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

According to a Leger Marketing poll commissioned by QMI Agency, support for a ban is highest in Quebec at 73%.

Burkas are rare in Canada. They totally obliterate the identity of the woman inside. The face is covered with a mesh grille, like a beekeeper’s hat.

But less rare is the niqab, which leaves a slit open for the eyes.

More common still is the hijab, which covers the head and neck like a scarf.

Get to know those words, as you’ll be seeing more of them in the years ahead.

Others are planning to teach your daughters about them. Last fall, Mattel sponsored an exhibition featuring Barbie in a burka.

Canada’s misguided experiment with multiculturalism pretends that all cultural ideas are equal, and Canadian values, such as the equality of men and women, are no better than foreign values like the subjugation of women.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, enacted in 1982 when our Muslim population was tiny, is contradictory.

Section 27 of the Charter calls for “the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”

But Section 28 says that rights “are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”

Well, which is it? “Enhancing” Saudi values? Or guaranteeing women’s equality?

Because you can’t have both.

Margaret Atwood published her sci-fi novel The Handmaid’s Tale, about America being taken over by a Christian theocracy that treats women as sexual property, 25 years ago.

It has become trite to watch cultural liberals like Atwood bravely attack imaginary discrimination, while staying silent on real discrimination.

The Handmaid’s Tale won Atwood the Governor General’s Award for fiction. A book about the subjugation of women in radical Islam would win Atwood a death threat.

Atwood loves posing as a feminist at champagne receptions in her honour. But she’ll leave the heavy lifting to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

She’s the Somali refugee who wrote and narrated a movie called Submission, about the place of women in radical Islam.

The film’s producer, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered for it, but a note pinned with a knife into his body referred primarily to Hirsi Ali, who has had to live under around-the-clock security ever since.

That’s all a bit too real for Atwood, and is the reason why other feminists like the once-noisy Judy Rebick are so meek and gentle with the real butchers of women’s rights.

So, should the burka be banned?

It’s anathema for a free country like Canada to tell citizens how to dress.

The same liberty that allows the rest of us to dress as we like is the liberty that allows a woman to hide her face.

But what about in a bank?

Should masked women, Muslim or not, be allowed into a bank? If that’s okay, how about a man in a ski mask?

How about testifying in court?

Who else can hide their eyes and facial expressions while condemning an accused or swearing to their own innocence?

And why stop at witnesses — what about judges or police officers in a burka?

What about ID cards like a driver’s licence?

What point is an ID card if it doesn’t actually ID you?

Can you vote with a mask on? Board a plane?

If a burka is okay, how about a Ku Klux Klan mask?

But more than all that, is wearing a burka truly an act of individual liberty?

For some it is. But for others, it is a manifestation of tyranny — a brutal husband demanding submission; a radical imam threatening frightened immigrant women.

We know from the case of Aqsa Parvez — killed by her father and brother for dressing in western fashion rather than in traditional Islamic clothing — that defying these orders can lead to murder.

In Afghanistan, uncovered women have acid thrown in their faces.

Only 54% of us want a ban?