Terrorist in Drag

The latest news: Maulana Abdul Aziz, the terror-inciting Muslim cleric at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, was arrested while trying to sneak out in a woman's burqa.

This is not the first time that a Muslim terrorist has hid under a woman's burqa to elude capture. Indeed, it is totally consistent with the Muslim terrorist ploy of using ambulances to transport bombs and terrorist personnel. And the IRA Provos, who rank perhaps a half step above the Muslim terrorists at best, have also had instances of dressing up in drag to escape Maze Prison.

And even when the Muslim woman is really a woman, she still can be carrying a bomb under her burqa.

This is all very troubling. On one hand, there are the obvious security issues involved in allowing people who apparently are women to walk about at large wearing burqas. On the other hand, if we prohibit burqas (which I happen to favor), then the civil libertarian sob sisters will demand that religious Jewish women not be permitted to cover their hair.

This all is more than just a hypothetical scenario for me. My wife is one of those religious Jewish women who does cover her hair. And at the culturally diverse educational institution where I teach, I have had students sporting all kinds of head coverings. One semester I had 3 kippot (in addition to my own kippah), a shaitel, two turbans and 4 hijabs on my class roster.

More to the point, I have had in my classes Muslim women who covered their faces with niqabs. And while I never at any time feared for my personal security on account of it, I would be less than honest if I were to tell you that I never gave it a second thought.

There needs to be a way to find out who and what are underneath the burqas and the niqabs. There are two ways of doing this:

1. Have the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spend millions and millions of our tax dollars to develop a hand-held burqa buster device which detects the minute electromagnetic resonances of the chromosomes to determine the gender of the wearer, as well as the signature resonances of explosive materials.

2. Use good old animate energy. Man's Best Friend can surely be trained to sniff out the burqa wearers. My favorite cyberspace canine, Lagniappe, has been trained to do something similar to this. The basic principles and technology are already available, and, quite frankly, I personally have a higher degree of confidence in a cadre of properly trained canine companions than in any of DARPA's high-cost overrun technology.