“But You Separate Yourself From Society”
“Were you interviewed face to face by a male governor of the school for this job? It’s a simple question…To assess your suitability for this job? And you did not wear the veil for that interview?”
Wow.
Swill salute to Davo in the comments at Tim’s.
UPDATE and BUMP: You’ll never guess who just used the word “separate”…
British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped into the debate over the integration of Muslims into British society on Tuesday, calling the full veil worn by some Muslim women “a mark of separation“.
Controversy has erupted in Britain over the wearing of the veil with some leaders of Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims accusing the government of stirring up Islamophobia.
…Asked if a woman who wore the veil could make a full contribution to British society, Blair said: “It is a mark of separation and that’s why it makes other people from outside the community feel uncomfortable.”
“No one wants to say that people don’t have the right to do it, that’s to take it too far, but I think we do need to confront this issue about how we integrate people properly with our society and all the evidence is when people do integrate more they achieve more as well.
…Blair called for a debate on how the Muslim community integrates into British society and on how Islam comes to terms with the modern world.
His government has begun to question whether Britain’s traditional policy of promoting a multicultural society — where different communities live side by side without having a single British identity imposed on them — has backfired by contributing toward the isolation of some communities.
…”What is happening, especially in the last few months, has been a barrage of demonization of the Muslim community to such an extent that the community is now scared and the whole community feels vulnerable,” MCB General Secretary Muhammad Abdul Bari told BBC Radio.
“Scared” and “vunerable” like the way the British feel about “bombs in the subway”, “on buses” and “airplanes”? THAT kind of “scared”?
You can thank your freakin’ neighbors for that, Abdul.
Nanny State | tree hugging sister | 
October 17, 2006 10:27 am
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Veil or no veil, after listening to the woman speak you have to wonder why she was ever hired as a teacher.
hired as a teacher
She wasn’t. She was a teaching assistant. A post similar to that held by 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan.
Stunning stuff.
It’s all agent provocateur stuff, exploiting that leverage is 90-percent of identity-politics.