Originally Posted by
Burney
Of course it isn't the biggest problem. However, it is an attempt to undermine muslim men's control over their womenfolk by making it clear that the law will not tolerate it. It is an attack on a clear symbol of patriarchal oppression and thus on the whole system of oppression that is inherent to Islam. As things stand, Islamic women's bodies are controlled by Islamic men. This is an attempt to wrest that control away from them and thus undermine their social control.
Your argument presupposes that these women have entire agency over how they dress. They do not. By conditioning, coercion and threat they are forced into this ridiculous garb from the time they hit puberty to allow their families and later their husbands to control them. An entire culture is busy keeping these women dressed like this and the only agency with the power to help these women escape these bonds is the state, which by its nature can only do it by heavy-handed means.
The fact is that these women's bodies are a battleground in a war between western, liberal culture and regressive, patriarchal Islam. Of course we all would wish that these women would simply be allowed to dress as they wish, but as things stand, they are being forced to dress a certain way by the regressive, patriarchal Islamic culture. If it's a binary choice (and it is) between that and being forced to dress a certain way by western culture, I would prefer the latter.
Up to now we have allowed Islam to retain often brutal control over its womenfolk and not insisted upon our cultural norms. As it becomes clear that Islam won't compromise, that is changing and the west is starting to wake up to the fact that if we don't insist on our way of doing things, we will be washed away.
Of course armed men forcing a woman to remove clothes makes for bad optics. We all agree that it is not desirable to force our norms upon people, but if those people refuse to assimilate and that refusal becomes problematic to the point of violence and terrorism, then no choice is left. To quibble about the optics of the situation is to miss the bigger point.