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Muslim leader Dr. Jasser rips ‘insanity’ of S.I.’s burkini cover: ‘Doesn’t make sense…huge contradiction for the left’

May 3, 2019 | | Print Article
Video screenshot.

While Sports Illustrated celebrated its annual swimsuit edition with a history-making feature of a model wearing a hijab and burkini, critics are slamming the decision to glorify the symbols of oppression.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser called out the left-wing “insanity” in Hollywood and elsewhere which elevates an Islamist “honor culture” with a breathless fawning over the fundamentalist attire which “just doesn’t make sense.”

Jasser, a medical doctor, author as well as founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, spoke about the identity politics at play by the left during SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow on Thursday.

“I think it’s insanity where sort of mainstream folks — or however you want to identify them — [in] Hollywood and the left use Muslims as this sort of identity checkbox,” Jasser, a devout Muslim who served 11 years as a medical officer in the U. S. Navy, said. “If you look at the rationale of having a swimsuit edition that has a model that’s dressed in a burkini, it just doesn’t make sense no matter which way you look at it.”

The Sports Illustrated issue in question featured 21-year-old Halima Aden, who was born in a refugee camp in Kenya and moved to the U.S. when she was seven.

“It’s a point to please the fundamentalists — the Salafists — who don’t believe in and don’t accept the objectification of women,” Jasser said.

“If that’s true, they’re not going to be reading that magazine, and that burkini and having that model in that edition still objectifies her, and it doesn’t even really fit the description of a what a burkini should be, because you can still see her body’s shape,” he contended.

“Even women I know in our community that are conservative and believe in modest dress are offended by that objectification,” he added.

The Sports Illustrated issue presented the model wearing the restrictive clothing as an expression of beauty while Aden was ecstatic with the magazine’s woke decision to shoot her photos on location in the country she fled as a child. A tweet by SI Swimsuit earlier this week featured a video and the hashtag #ShaterringPerceptions.

But Jasser correctly noted that the idea of hijabs and even burkinis flies in the face of those purporting to support the #MeToo movement.

“If you’re on the left and you believe in women’s rights and equality and no limitations of dress, which is part of the modern movement of the #MeToo generation. It really makes no sense,” he said.

“They’re actually empowering an image of hijab and control of women’s bodily clothing, which is against Western ideas. So Sports Illustrated has allowed itself to glorify the hijab, glorify this honor culture or purity culture of Islamists, and somehow that’s supposed to be a good thing,” Jasser explained, adding that it is “a huge contradiction for the left.”

“Our pop culture seems to be completely backward in its principles. If this is about women’s freedom and equality, this is not the way to get there,” he asserted.

Jasser noted that the left-wing interest in Muslims “proves that their attention to Muslim issues is simply them being the victims,” as they exploit them “for their own sort of identity politics,” which he argues is what the left does with “every minority group that they claim to take under their wing.”

He also spoke with Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the left’s “irrational” promotion of the hijab on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Jasser, whose parents fled Syria in the mid-1960s, is not alone in his assessment of how liberals have been missing the mark in extolling the hijab.

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Frieda Powers
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