The clairvoyant Ferran Sáez Mateu did, yesterday, another article of yours, thoughtful, essential, lucid, well-eaten and easy to digest, on the use of the veil, and the political debate it has generated in our country. We all know that he threw the baseball pitcher of the Catalan Alliance and the baptizer of Junts has tried to take over, unsuccessfully.
I suppose that in these two options (tolerate and accept or prohibit) there is an underlying issue. You see. When I see, for example, some Tibetan monks with shaved heads and a pumpkin suit, I smile with understanding and distance. When I see reports about the Amish, who don't want to use technology and sew their own clothes by hand, I smile with understanding and distance. "That's their problem," I think. And when a friend tells me that their Jewish neighbors, on Saturday, wait on the landing for someone to open the door, because on Saturday they can't operate devices like a doorknob, I smile, with understanding and distance, and I think that, nevertheless, waiting for someone to do to you what you can't do doesn't seem very coherent, and that the law is made.
So what's wrong with me with the Islamic veil? Why does this make me uncomfortable? Why doesn't this make me smile with the same understanding and distance as with other, so-called, cultural issues? Perhaps because I've only seen the Amish in news reports? Why aren't the streets full of Orthodox Jews wearing heavy hats covered with plastic wrap for when it rains, like in New York, while we're increasingly seeing burqas in some cities? The reason I feel uneasy when I see a woman wearing an Islamic veil is that... this cultural practice only applies to women. only Women are the ones who cover themselves. And it's this covering up, to a greater or lesser extent, that equates them, for me, with property, and that's why I was so moved the day I saw one, wearing a burka, being fed by her husband at McDonald's, as if she were a pet.
