Should You Have to Show Your Face to Run for Office?

Some politicians are accused of being two-faced, but one candidate for office in the UK has no face. Fajila Patel wants to be the first faceless politician by getting elected wearing a burka.

Newspapers claim that Fajila is 36-years-old and a mother of four, but critics argue that it could really be anyone under there. Her ‘Niqab’is one of the most extreme versions of the garment that some people associate with the ‘burka’, spread out of Saudi Arabia and covers everything except the eyes. (Some Muslims insist on also partly or entirely covering the eyes of women.)

In the UK, which already appears to be run by faceless bureaucracies, elected officials are supposed to offer what the Czechs had very briefly called “socialism with a human face”. But what happens when the socialists with a human face are replaced by faceless Islamists?

Fajila, or whoever is under there at any given time, had already run for office and lost back in 2022 to another Pakistani candidate in an area that is 84% Muslim. And even they weren’t quite ready for the election being in the bag quite this literally. Still hope springs eternal in the Islamic breast, and she, he, or someone at any rate, is back, and running for office yet again.

The UK requires women, men or people wearing burkas to go into a private room and remove their masks in front of a female officer along with an interpreter, a chaperone and two partridges in a pear tree to establish who they are for such minor matters as obtaining a drivers’ license or entering the country. It’s unclear if there would be similar rules for an elected official.

The question is not an academic one since there really is no way to tell who is wearing the black klansman outfit when campaigning, casting votes or driving down the street. Conventional politicians are supposed to have laminated pieces of papers that show their faces. But when the face on the paper is just a black mask and the face of the politician is a black mask, any security guards had better be good at reading eyes to be able to figure out who’s who in politics.

Does this even matter in the town of Blackburn in Lancashire, once a cotton town with a Roman ruin, now a Pakistani colony with an English ruin? The crime rate is high and the elected officials include a Khan, a Hussein and the man whom Fajila will be challenging again, Parwaiz Akhtar. Her husband, Altaf Patel, is already a councilor, representing ‘Little Harwood & Whitebirk Ward’, who likes it when people call him ‘Tiger’. Fajila may wear black, but her campaign colors are green and red to match those of the flag of the Islamic Arab Revolt and the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

With an 84% Islamic occupier rate, none of the parties have any hope of running anyone there except one brand of Islamist or another. Fajila Patel is being backed by the ‘conservatives’ who have done the math and decided that when in Pakistan, do as the Pakistanis do.

The chairman of the Blackburn Conservative Association claimed that Fajila “wants to make a difference to break down boundaries” while wearing a giant boundary, and insisted that “Fajila chooses to wear the Niqab, which is her right and a right that we would always defend.”

Not everyone saw things that way, which is why the local Tories purged any ‘Islamophobes’.

“We had issues with Islamophobia. I took over this party three or four years ago. There is no room for any type of racism in a party that I head up, and I will be quite straight with you, we’ve had to remove people,” Julian Arnold, the chairman of Blackburn Conservative Association, warned.

In the ranks of the new ‘conservatives’, there will be room for burkas, but no room for anyone at all concerned about them.

“It’s what the Conservative party is about – and we are ground-breaking,” Arnold claimed, and indeed nothing is quite as ‘groundbreaking’ as going back to Islamic medievalism and bringing Afghanistan to Blackburn. It’s almost as groundbreaking as 9/11 and the conquest of Constantinople.

How has embracing this sort of thing worked out for the Tories? Councilor Altaf Patel, Fajila’s less masked half, who started out as a conservative, is now an independent. And Fajila has already shed the blue campaign colors to fly the red and the green. The Tories have yet to achieve even a pyrrhic victory of the kind that some of the other parties have mastered.

The Tories have become so rotten with appeasement and so desperate to copy their leftist betters that they are determined to trade their national birthright for a mess of kebabs and to hail as groundbreaking the introduction of the stuff their grandparents despised as sheer barbarism.

What will be truly groundbreaking is when the cathedrals have been made into mosques, William and Kate convert to Islam, and Christians tiptoe around Islamic sensibilities lest they be bombed, beheaded or otherwise murdered. But then I suppose that the last one has already been achieved and the rest is just a matter of nailing down the details and the dissidents.

Whether or not Fajila Patel fulfills her dream, her husband’s dream or the dream of whatever is behind those yards of black cloth of becoming the first masked person to rule a European nation without being featured in a Dumas novel, eventually there will be a historic ‘first’ burka politician.

And the same pols who lecture us on Islamophobia and how welcoming in the stranger so he can abolish your religion and then cut your throat is in the highest values of the Church of England, the Catholic Church, and the dodgier kinds of Judaism, and what have you, will gather to celebrate the first be’burka’ed PM just as they celebrated every politician in a hijab.

And even rushed to don their own. Eventually though the female politicians who put on a flowing £300 scarf made of some flowing material for a brief session in a community center down in Manchester will find that they have to wear the real thing and that it comes in every color they want. So long as it’s black and barely lets them breathe and make human eye contact.

The difference between our politicians and theirs is that their politicians may cover every part of themselves but their eyes while ours are determined to cover their eyes and ours until it’s too late.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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