Everything wrong with the Daily Tele's niqāb story.

Last week, a reporter and a photographer from the Daily Telegraph took it upon themselves to solve Islamophobia by playing dress up in a niqāb. Telegraph reporter Tanya Smart put on the veil and loitered around Sydney's Martin Place and Lakemba, attempting to document the reactions of the general public. Here's why it was fucked:

- Rather than finding a Muslim woman to speak directly about her own experiences, or writing an editorial herself, the Daily Telegraph sent a conventionally attractive white non-Muslim woman to dress up for two days.

- The photo captions use 'niqāb' and 'burqa' interchangeably, which makes about as much sense as seeing someone's bootcut jeans and saying "Nice jorts!" (Nobody has ever said that about jorts.) A five second Google search would explain the differences

- Smart projects her insecurities onto everyone, inventing opinions and intentions for everyone who so much as glances at her (and even for people who don't.)

- Smart writes "Adrenaline was pumping and I wanted to rip off my Muslim garb and be me again. But I didn’t. I bit my tongue because I knew I had already come so far" except literally all she did was put on a niqāb and she could've taken it off at any time and gone on with her life facing none of the persecution she allegedly experienced with it on. The discomfort she was feeling was in fact the cognitive dissonance of losing her white, able-bodied privilege.

- Smart makes a big deal of "racist and abusive taunts" cast her way but only gives evidence of two. These are the only incidents in which her discrimination was explicit; every other example is speculated. (Not all discrimination is verbal or obvious and being made to feel alien is oppressive in itself, but Smart's description is totally glorified.)

- Smart decides that people smiling at her might be smiling out "of sympathy or the only way they could hide their fears from me." She then says "I won’t ever know," as if she hadn't just invented motivations for several strangers in order to bolster her angle of alienation.

- Smart is apparently paranoid, or at least highly susceptible to the recent fear-mongering in the press: "I had fears of being spat on, or even pushed in front of a train."

- Smart claims that some would stare for a second before looking away while others would gaze at her "in disbelief" which is just as much fantasy as the rest of her projections. A simpler explanation: anyone staring for longer was doing so because the media had done such a terrible job of communicating what the niqāb represents that they still haven't sorted their own feelings about it. Not because they couldn't believe what they were seeing.

- Smart drools melodrama all over her experience: "I started to tremble and felt my legs would give way when I started to walk down stairs to exit the station. But I carried on." Oh you brave soul, you noble journalist!

- In Lakemba, she compares wearing a white t-shirt and black pants to the alienation she felt wearing the niqāb in Martin Place. "I knew straight away I did not fit in. It was enough to make me feel uncomfortable."

- Smart finds it revelatory that a Muslim girl on the street doesn't mind helping her find out where to buy a niqāb, even though, uh, why wouldn't she be?

- Smart was apparently expecting the niqāb to teleport her to a world in which national identity ceased to be an issue: "The woman was friendly, but my heart sank when she asked if I was 'Australian'."

- Smart finishes by claiming to have reflected on her experience, despite no supporting evidence.

Lone Wolf wrote:

THE Daily Tele's office is, or has been, full of idiots ~ Miranda Devine, Piers Ackerman, Samantha Maiden, and the likes of Sandra Lee, Alan Jones and John Laws at various times...

AND then during the Sydney Water contamination scare a few years ago, there were the constant lies and fantasies they were purely making up, seemingly simply to scare the Sydney populace even further ~ creating a fictional "nurse" that they claimed as an "expert in Giardia" source; claiming a shortage of (non-existent..) "antibiotics"; and piling lies upon lies over a couple of weeks..

SO the hysterical neuroses and fictional storytelling displayed by Ms Smart is simply maintaining the long standing Murdoch Press tradition of "give us a good story at any cost, and bugger the facts !" It shouldn't surprise anybody nowadays, what with the depths that News Ltd fell to with their "News of the World" phone-tapping scandals.