The attraction advertising announced by HEC Montréal is reprehensible in more ways than one. It targets a category of people, in particular women from Algeria, but specifically those who are veiled, as if the others do not have the right to apply for this offer. However, this training institution seems to want to promote universal access.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
What is absolutely reprehensible on the part of HEC is the abysmal ignorance of this institution which wants to be or claims to be scientific by displaying a veiled woman in an advertisement intended to attract Algerian students.
However, Algeria has a bloody history with the Islamic and Islamist and non-Muslim veil, it should be remembered.
Thousands of women, young girls and teenagers have been doused with acid, kidnapped and raped, killed, slaughtered, disembowelled, mutilated in the most barbaric way possible and it is this symbol, of which we keep the stigmata forever and which are part of our most painful nightmares, which is chosen by HEC Montréal.
PHOTO FROM THE HEC MONTRÉAL WEBSITE
A veiled student of Algerian origin appears on the home page of the HEC Montréal website.
This choice, not insignificant, sends two messages to us secular Algerian women: the first is the trivialization of the crimes committed to impose this degrading symbol which is not religious, but patriarchal, political, retrograde and misogynistic, and the second an affront to the parents of barely pubescent teenagers and to all those innocent women torn from life under the horrified eyes of their families and relatives whose only crime, if there was a crime, was to wear their hair just like the granddaughter of the prophet who refused this injunction of the Islamists 14 centuries ago.
Greedy West
My friends and friends from Algeria are not surprised by this greedy West in loss of humanist values and which no longer knows what to invent to maintain its supremacy and its hegemony.
The recent memory of the abandonment of Afghan women is still vivid in our memories.
By wanting to hug too much, we end up suffocating.
What HEC Montreal is saying to Algerian power through this decadent publicity is that its preference is for veiled candidates who apply for this program.
And to Algerians in general: veil your daughters if you want them to be accepted in Quebec.
The countries of the Arabian Peninsula and Iran do no less, but WITHOUT ANY CONDESCENDENCE. Their misogyny is assumed with arrogance and relativized by Western communitarianism.
How sad for HEC which erases Algerian women who continue to fight for their dignity with courage despite the vicissitudes.
HEC Montréal chooses a fundamentally patriarchal and misogynistic message to communicate with women who fight peacefully with dignity for their freedom in this so-called Arab-Muslim world. Nausea makes my heart ache.