Britain, WTF?

To be quite sure, this is not just the UK, and this is not the first time. But this case is very public, and very blatant. The UK is trying to strip Shamima Begum of her UK citizenship.

Shamima Begum is a teenager who was born and raised in Britain, and left for Syria in 2015 at the age of 15, probably in order to enjoy her 72 virgins. Now she is 19, has had enough of war and virgins, and wishes to return to the UK with her baby.

Truth be told, I have very little sympathy for her, and if it turned out that she had been blown to bits during that war I would have muttered something like "natural death" and "Darwin award". She hasn't, though, she is alive and wishes to return to her home country, as she should have the right to, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 13 (2) ("Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.") The UK is trying to deny her this right, on account that they think she is also eligible for citizenship of Bangladesh.

She is a British citizen, born and raised. If she has been involved in terrorist acts in Syria, she belongs in a British prison, or a Syrian prison if they want to keep her there. AFAIK (the situation has been changing all the time) she has not been charged with anything, which probably means that the UK authorities don't even know whether she was really involved in terrorist activities, or whether she was just going through her 72 living virgins of some Fucking Moron Martyrs Brigade.

Yeah, I get it that if you have a case of a probable terrorist whose terrorist activities you cannot prove in a court of law, it's very-very convenient to try to dump her on another country if you can find some suckers: you get rid of her, you don't have to meet the proof standards of a criminal trial, and in case you can prove she is a terrorist your taxpayers don't have to pay for her imprisonment. The thing is, convenience isn't everything, or at least shouldn't be in a civilized country. If it were, there would be an even more convenient way to get rid of her: a nice bullet in the head, without a trial. There is a reason we don't usually do this kind of thing.

What they are doing is both an obviously racist treatment of a citizen, and very unfair to people of Bangladesh, who have so far had nothing to do with Shamima Begum, and would undoubtedly like to keep it that way. The whole idea that "it's not so bad to deprive dual citizens of their citizenship, because they have another one" can only result in countries competing with who will get to dump the undesirable dual citizen first, and indeed while I was writing this  Bangladesh has issued a statement that can be summarized as "up yours, Britain", and I gotta say that in this case I am cheering for Bangladesh.

It's doesn't take a crystal ball to see how this will go: the kind of people who have a western and a third-world citizenship will make sure to get rid of the third-world citizenship before joining the Fucking Moron Martyrs Brigade or Holy 72 Incels Regiment, the people who have two or more western citizenships wouldn't care as much, and the next time Britain wants to strip its citizenship from a dual citizen it might as well be from some UK-raised fucker with a Finnish parent. Do you want them here? Because I'd rather not.

A little media review

A horrible crime has happened in UK this month: a group of thugs attacked a man, stabbed him twice, poured acid over him and into his throat, and smashed his face with bricks. According to some sources, he lost both eyes; according to some sources, only one. Sme sources estimate burns at 50% of his skin, some 90%, and all of them say he lost his tongue.

Thoroughly unpleasant business. The public naturally wants to know who would do such thing and why. I decided to see what kind of coverage the press provides, and chose as my sample the first Google News grouping of that story that I found by googling acid+attack. The first 20 links that came up.

The actual facts of the case appear to be: a Danish Muslim man of Asian (in the British sense of the word) origin was friends with, or possibly had an affair with, a Muslim woman who was born in Britain and is of Pakistani origin. A group of people (in the loose sense of the word) consisting wholly or partially of the woman's relatives did the deed, seven were arrested, five of those released on bail, then one of those rearrested.

I have an unexplainable gut feeling that origins of the participants are not entirely irrelevant to the way the thing went, and should be mentioned. Let's see how good my 20 sources are at it:

Out of 20:

17 mentioned that the man in question was Danish, clearly the most relevant fact,
16 mentioned that there was a married Muslim woman involved in there,
9 said that the Danish man was Asian (in the British sense of the word), but only 3 said that he was Muslim,
13 mentioned honor, as in "honor crime",
4 mentioned the Pakistani origin of the woman,
3 mentioned that at least some of the perpetrators were the woman's relatives.

Of course you can make the case that they don't need to mention religion or culture, either because this is one of those unfortunate events that can happen to anyone with approximately the same probability, or quite the opposite: that anytime a man gets brutally attacked after spending time with a Muslim woman everybody with two brain cells knows who did it. I am not however sure that I approve of such journalism.

The honorary mention goes to BBC: here and here the only origin or motive detail they offer is that the man was Danish. No mention of Muslims and/or honor at all.

The first rule: don't ask

This is just so wrong:

A salon owner, Sarah Desrosiers, was looking for a junior stylist. She received dozens of applications, including one from Bushra Noah, a Muslim woman who wears a hijab. She did not want to hire a woman who wouldn't show her own hair at work, because she believes that a stylist's hair needs to be shown to "provide clients with a showcase of different looks", and she asked Bushra whether she would be willing to take her hijab off while at work. Bushra said no, and didn't get the job. Bushra sued.

In the end Sarah did not hire anyone for the position.

Bushra sued for £15,000, later increased to £34,000 to compensate for all the hate mail she received, although I am pretty sure Sarah didn't write it all. The court ruled that Bushra's claim of direct discrimination failed, but her claim for indirect discrimination had succeeded, and ordered Sarah to pay £4,000 for "injury to feelings".

Mind you, I think Bushra definitely has a point. Except in very specific cases (models, for example), I am very wary of businesses using employees as decoration, to the point where I at least might actively boycott a business for that. The idea of stylists' own hair serving as a necessary inspiration for a customer seems quite silly to me, and opens a rather nasty can of worms, such as the question of whether a bald person can and should be legitimately discriminated against while applying for hairdressing positions, or fired from a hairdressing job. IMO people do not specifically seek out hairdressers wearing hairstyles they themselves would like, and people seem to visit hairdressers of the opposite sex without complaining much about the lack of inspiration provided by their hairstyles.

Of course it might also be that after 15 years in the field Sarah knows something about it that I don't. Nevertheless, if there were a real discrimination case - if Bushra's resume were the best, and Sarah hired a less-qualified person because of the hijab issue, I would be all for Bushra.

The disturbing thing about the case is not that a hijab-wearing woman wants to work as a hairdresser, it's that people get convicted for discrimination on such flimsy evidence, and that Sarah, basically, got convicted only for trying to negotiate the issue.

Bushra was not the best applicant, the hijab was not her only problem, and nobody actually got hired for the position. She only knew that hijab was an issue at all because Sarah asked.

I don't know enough about British law to figure out whether the court or the lawmakers were to blame, but if you are a society trying to protect a minority group from discrimination, punishing prospective employers for trying negotiate potential minority-related issues with them is a somewhat counterproductive idea.

What Sarah and other salon owners learned from this experience is that either you don't invite Muslims to the interviews at all, which might be a fairly easy thing to do if you get dozens of resumes for one position, or you do invite them, but weed out everyone who remotely looks like they might want to wear a hijab, without ever actually asking about it. Yep, a great step for equality. Backwards.

Bushra "has given up her ambitions to become a hairdresser and is studying travel and tourism at Hammersmith and West London College while working part-time in a shop". No shit, after becoming Britain's hairdressing industry's most famous least desirable job applicant whose hurt feelings cost £4000. Muslims might be a protected group, but people who sue everything in sight sure aren't.

I wonder how much of the hate mail that Bushra got was from Muslims working or aspiring to work in the hairdressing industry in UK. "Way to go, sister! Now we can't get any interviews at all!"