A Fox News website has picked up a hoax story about an Islamic council in Pakistan protesting the use of padded and colorful bras and presented it as fact.
The story was illustrated with a picture of a woman’s mid-section and carried the headline “Pakistan: Islamic Clerics Protest Women Wearing Padded Bras as ‘Devil’s Cushions’.” The lead of the Fox Nation story, which sources the piece to the Indian news website sify.com, reads:
“The Council of Islamic Ideology in Pakistan has protested the use of padded and colourful bras by Muslim women, and recommended that Pakistani Muslim researchers should try to invent an innerwear that makes female assets unnoticeable.”
The problem is, if one takes the time to track the story back to its source, the whole thing is an obvious Onion-style satire – a fact first pointed out by Arif Rafiq of the Pakistan Policy Blog.
Fox Nation is an openly conservative news and opinion aggregation site that is part of the Fox News network. It’s not clear what sort of editorial standards are applied to the site, which carries a mixture of hard news and catnip for conservative readers (sample headlines: “Democrats politicize tsunami” and “The President’s afternoon: A round of golf”).
Fox Nation commenters, for their part, reacted to the bra story with outrage. “If I was a woman – anywhere in the world, I’d be taking a close look at Islam and what it meant for me,” wrote commenter rebubinca.
A “louisiana_mom” replied: “How can anyone in their right mind defend this religion/cult is beyond me. The silence of NOW and other women’s rights organizations speak volumes as to where their true loyalties are (and it is not for the rights for women). I cannot believe anyone in the 21st century would even entertain the thought of allowing Sharia Law into any Western county.”