I fail to see what's bad about a Barbie in a burka. Women wear burkas. Barbie represents women in general (at least in narrow kind of toy terms, sort of). So why shouldn't Barbie wear a burka?

It seems some of your innuendo runs to the idea that women wearing the burka is necessarily the result of some kind of abuse. That's unfair. Maybe it's abusive to fill the stores with pants that don't come up all the way in the back so everyone in the mall can see your ass crack. Which of course you now have to wax because if you're seen with body hair, you'll be psychologically abused by your peers. Maybe not having to worry about people staring at your tits and ass all the time, and treating you as inferior because of your looks -- too pretty! Not pretty enough! -- would actually be embraced as liberating by some women!

Just think: If American women wore burkas, that Sarah Palin Newsweek cover would've been much different.

It's a funny thing, religiously informed dress. My daughter goes to a school where the administration is largely Turkish and Muslim. She takes Turkish as a language and last year we went on a school trip to a Turkish cultural center. The Turkish teacher leading the trip wears a hijab, which is to say the traditional headscarf. We adults had some time to talk and she told us how, back in Turkey, as a teacher, she would be forbidden by law from wearing the hijab. Turkey has such an inferiority complex, and is so desperate to appear as a modern, secular country which just happens to be mostly Muslim -- which it is -- the government has made it illegal for government workers to wear traditional Muslim clothing. Turkey wants to appear so liberal, open, and free that they've curtailed their citizens' liberties. The teacher also told us how her mother and aunts had fought for so long to be free of the hijab that they don't understand why she'd want to wear it. But she does.

And it occurred to me that that's one of the good things about America. You want to wear the hijab, you wear it. You don't, you don't. But the burka might be too far for America, even if some women would like to wear it.

I don't know if you've noticed, but someone else always has a say in what you wear. I'm not allowed to walk the streets in my town naked, for example. Further, I can only wear what I can buy, and I can only buy what's sold in stores. Fashion is a cruel mistress.

I'm not arguing that oppression isn't bad, that stoning is acceptable, or that female circumcision is good. (I'm not even okay with male circumcision.) However the burka, while at this moment, in America, is associated with those things, it is not, in fact, those things. It is the way some women dress. I can guarantee there are women in the world who would choose to dress that way entirely on their own. In fact, I've seen them here in America (if not the burka, then at least the abaya).

And, Jim, when did I say anything about the Confederate flag?

Nobody here has proposed a prohibition on burkas, burkhas, or a barrel if you want to wear one, crywalt. Whatever, just keep yours covered.

What is sickening is the crass trivialization of a manner of uniform apparel worn in some corners of the Muslim world where terrible abuse and oppression of women and girls does occur on a daily basis. To market, even in the effort to draw publicity to an auction, which for all I know may have an intended beneficial outcome for some worthy cause, is an outrageous insult to those that have absolutely no say in what they wear, much less who they marry, if they will be allowed to learn to read, etc.

Writing here about your refined sense of multicultural understanding doesn't impress if the end result is that one other person turns a blind eye to the harsh life that many women and girls must endure in the name of something that approaches a medieval tradition.

Now if I designed a burhka, it would have a slogan on it like, "I'm with stupid" and the arrow would be pointing 5 paces ahead.

One important thing sliding by here is that burkas are not synonymous with Islam. Burkas are cultural, not religious. They're based on interpretations of the Koran, but they're not Islam.

Mono says "something on the order of half the Muslim population in the world enjoying status conspicuously lower than the males" which is woefully incorrect. Not all Muslims treat women as inferior. Not all Muslims force women to wear burkas, or abayas, or hijabs. In some places, women wear them because they prefer them.

Perhaps they prefer them for the wrong reasons but I don't see how anyone could tell that, let alone a white guy from America who doesn't know squat about Islam or Persia or anywhere much.

I'm not sure, Khabalox, what gave you the idea that I thought women are wearing the burka to rebel against American fashion. I did make the comparison of what our culture demands of female dress versus what another culture demands of female dress. Both are oppressive in their own ways. I tend to feel burkas are more oppressive in some ways than American fashion, but then I'm American.

I am not, however, omniscient, as the other posters here are. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Muslim men? Dr. Zaius and Mono knows!