The news from Baghdad

The jihad against women is ancient, yet ever new. From a report from the city's universities in the Washington Times:

"Any girl student who does not wear a veil, we will burn her face with chemicals."

Under threat and physical attack, at least a third of the three thousand women who attend colleges in Baghdad have been given releases from class attendance for the rest of the academic year due to the increasing violence directed against them.

Among other things, the terrorists are demanding that all university classes be segregated and that contact between men and women be forbidden. Many women, intimidated and fearful, have taken to wearing veils to and from classes.

Bombs have been set off on campuses, women have been abducted and threatened, terrorists wait outside the gates to target women who wear Western dress or walk with their faces uncovered.

There is a severe cultural divide, a disconnect, between the idea of veiled women and those same mysterious creatures attempting to study differential equations through the gauze. This dissonance is so loud we are becoming deafened by its shrill, unrelenting fear.

Pray that all the noise is merely the death rattle of an anachronistic hatred.