Terry Firma

Every Saturday morning, I take my youngest daughter to the Y for swim class. While she’s in the water, I sit on the bleachers and watch her, and chat with other parents.

Apparently, that makes me a perv in the eyes of a lot of Muslims. And if I lived in Canada, and we went to a municipal pool, I might be told to leave the pool area while averting my gaze — because I’m a guy.

TORONTO – When a single dad signed his nine-year-old daughter up for female-only swim lessons, he didn’t realize he — as a man — was going to be banned from watching her practice. [The father] was shocked when he had the blinds to the viewing area of the Dennis R. Timbrell Recreation Centre pool in Flemingdon Park shut on him, and then was told by staffers it was for “religious reasons.”

“I spoke to a staff member and she told me that it’s because of Muslim women, that we’re not allowed to look at them or whatever,” he told the Toronto Sun Friday. “I don’t think religion has a role to play in a public pool.”

The city aquatics department confirms the account. The public pool also has gender-segregated time slots for men-only and women-only swimming, with the opposite sex not allowed to watch. This is requested by followers of Allah, for the same “religious and cultural reasons” as the no-male-onlookers rule that’s in effect during girls’ swims. The newspaper discovered that the policy, and the accommodation of religious demands, is in effect all over Toronto:

There are currently nine pools across Toronto that run the female-only swim program. All pools follow the same policy of not allowing people of the other sex to watch practices,

said city aquatics manager Anne Jackson.

Though some Muslims may crow about these concessions from the kuffar, I doubt they’re doing themselves any favors. The mental image I’m stuck with is of men who are collectively so sexually repressed sensitive that they might feel or do something impure at the sight of females — even eight- and nine-year-olds! — in a swimming pool.

Is that how Muslims want other people to think of them?

[images from the catalog of modestkini.com]