It you find I’m quoting my friend Jeremy Taylor a lot lately, it’s because the man just cracks me up. Yesterday he took on British senior government minister Jack Straw, who just last week called on Muslim women to lift their veils as a way of facilitating social integration:

So there is Jack Straw, a senior minister in the British government, sitting in his constituency office in northern England receiving visitors, when in comes a figure dressed in a niqab, covered from head to foot, with only the eyes visible.

Jack starts to sweat. He tries hard to be liberal and tolerant, poor fellow. On the other hand, he was the man who with Tony Blair helped to plan and execute Britain’s role in the disastrous Iraqi war. And this figure in front of him, with only the eyes visible, could be anyone. A suicide bomber. A gunman. What if there’s a grenade under the niqab?

Further down the page:

But poor Jack is very confused about this veil and scarf business. Isn’t this repression of Muslim women, exactly the sort of thing he organised a war against? Yet here are young British Muslim women actually choosing to wear the hijab, or the niqab, or the even more concealing burqa (which hides the wearer’s eyes too, behind a mesh screen). One of them even tells the British Guardian that her niqab gives her a sense of self-esteem, even though her culture doesn’t require her to wear one, and that she’s figured out how to eat McDonald’s hamburgers through it. Jack tears his thinning grey hair in bewilderment.

JT reminds us that we here in Trinidad had our own “hijab melodrama” a few years back:

when a local Catholic convent school tried to stop a student from wearing one. The school took the matter all the way to court, where it properly lost. Most of Europe is struggling with the issue now: how much individual liberty should be allowed when the results alarm the natives? Part of the debate comes from racism and xenophobia, but part also comes from middle-class people trying (like Jack) to be decent, but in fact feeling threatened by all sorts of strange and alarming things: hijabs, tattoos, nipple-rings, aggressive hair, deep black sunglasses that work like mirrors.

And ends with a bang:

So just help the lady with her broken streetlights or her tax audit, Jack, and help create the sort of atmosphere where she doesn’t have to cover her face to maintain her dignity in Tony Blair’s Britain.

But don’t take my word for it, go and read the whole thing.