World Hijab Day? We should be commemorating dead white men - Colin Brazier

World Hijab Day? This absurd confection has only been around since 2013, but it’s already catching on among our more gullible or Islamist-adjacent public figures. In New York, the city’s new Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, tweeted his support, saying: “Today, we celebrate the faith, identity, & pride of Muslim women & girls around the world who choose to wear the hijab, a powerful symbol of devotion & celebration of Muslim heritage.”

Choose to wear the hijab? Well, there’s the rub. Millions of Mamdani’s co-religionists would love to have a choice NOT to wear the hijab.

In Iran, for instance. There, women who “choose” to walk around in public without covering their heads, find themselves arrested, beaten up, tortured and worse. I wonder if they see the hijab as a “celebration of Muslim heritage” or a form of coercive control by men who hate the idea of women being free to do what they like.

So no, we should be extremely wary of attempts to hijack the calendar by giving over February 1st to World Hijab Day. And yet I predict you will hear much more of it in years to come.

Our public sector, NGOs and charities will fall meekly into line. Islamist activists, who are trying to legitimise a highly contentious worldview, will behave as if it’s as normal as Red Nose Day or Pancake Tuesday. Just a little light fun to lighten a dark day in February.

What garbage. But, as with Black History Month, the propagandists are pushing at an open door. They will guilt-trip white liberals into tolerating what should be intolerable.

Why should history be demarcated by race, with historical non-entities given star-billing? Why must British schoolchildren be forced to submit to a version of history that was dreamed up by activists in America, where the history of race relations is very different to our own? Or taught that Stonehenge was the work of black Neolithics? They shouldn’t. But they are.

It should escape nobody’s notice that, as these contrived events gain ground, our own historical collective memory withers. The currency of commemoration is devalued when we pack out the calendar with dates designed for a new population that has no ancestral or religious affinity with November 5th, Easter Sunday, or the Armistice.

Anyone who remembers the modus operandi of the communists who ran Cambodia will recall the idea of ‘Year Zero’; the great resetting of a nation’s sense of itself. The abolition of what went before. A wiping-clean of history so a new one could begin - from scratch.

Many of our woke apparatchiks will believe that Britain spends far too much time bowing before ‘white history’. Far too much time commemorating jingoistic customs (like VE Day, even though it reminds us how tyranny can be defeated).

Far too much time on obsolete religious festivals: so long as those festivals are Christian (bad, privileged, oppressing), rather than Muslim (good, underprivileged, oppressed).

When the woke hear ‘World Hijab Day’, they recognise it as a chance to be ‘inclusive’. I see it as an exercise in sophistry. A palpably one-sided attempt to turn a negative into a positive and rehabilitate a social practise that should be questioned or shunned, rather than embraced and celebrated.

If we do nothing about this, it will happen.

And one way of fighting back is to play the religion and race grifters at their own game.

Today, for instance, is the anniversary of the death of Berkshire-born Jethro Tull. He ushered in the Agricultural Revolution, which saved millions from starvation, regardless of race. It was his seed drill which made this possible.

Just as the steam engine made travel practical across the globe, thanks to breakthroughs by the likes of Richard Trevithick.

Today marks the anniversary of his successful demonstration of the world’s first steam railway locomotive at the Penydaren Ironworks in South Wales.

So who’s for February 21st then? Industrial Revolution Day? Teach it in schools. Put it on stamps. Remind Britons, whatever their heritage, that the world is an infinitely better place thanks to the glorious strivings of Dead White Men.

It would go against the instincts of so many of our public bodies. The National Trust, for example, which this month appeared to take down the oil paintings of aristocratic white men from the walls of a grand country house - replacing them with all-too-predictable sociological screeds.

Or the Police headquarters in Scotland, which, a couple of years ago, removed all the pictures of previous chief constables for no better reason than ‘they were all men’.

Or the unbelievably woke Imperial War Museum, which closed its magnificent display of Victoria Cross recipients (heavily skewed - unsurprisingly - towards dead white men), for its latest exercise in social engineering.

The truth is that many of the custodians of our nation’s customs are not good-faith actors. From the taxpayer-funded theatres, galleries and museums which denigrate Empire and over-emphasise Windrush, to the progressive educationalists and BBC producers who think British history is ‘problematic’ - we are surrounded by people, whose pay is drawn from the public purse, who think it is their job to rewrite our island story.

We shouldn’t let them.

Happy Industrial Revolution Day!