Britain unveiled

When I was back in Britain the other week, I was struck by how every day the major news story was about the issue of Muslim integration. First, it was a Muslim cop being excused from guarding the Israeli Embassy during the conflict in Lebanon. Then it was a Muslim cab driver fined for refusing to carry a guide dog he thought religiously unclean. Finally, the veteran Labour politician Jack Straw set off a firestorm by suggesting that Muslim women shouldn’t wear the full veil. 

The debate is continuing to accelerate. In just the last few days we’ve had the Communities Secretary saying that the government wouldn’t fund Muslim groups which don’t actively combat extremism, a substitute teacher suspended for refusing to take off the full veil while teaching young children, and a report that the government has asked academics to spy on their students. Non-hysterical commentators are discussing the possibility of a Kulturkampf.

The veil issue unites two very different sections of British opinion. On the one hand, there are the “assimilationists” who object to the veil as an in-your-face statement of difference and otherness. Then, there are the liberals who believe the veil subjugates women and insist that no woman wears it voluntarily. (Those who think they are wearing it of their own free will are presumed to be suffering from false consciousness.)

Banning the veil would be phenomenally illiberal. Hoping that people choose not to wear it, though, is not unreasonable. As is their wont, the self-appointed Muslim leadership is using the issue to further divide and polarize the country. In an op-ed in The Guardian today, the deputy secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain writes:

Since John Reid demanded that Muslim "bullies" must be faced down and Jack Straw declared the veil a "statement of separation", ministers have fallen over themselves to make increasingly unbridled attacks on Muslims.

A look at what John Reid and Jack Straw actually said illustrates the absurdity of the charge. Straw expressed "concern that wearing the full veil [is] bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult. It [is] such a visible statement of separation and of difference.” Nowhere did he propose banning it or forcing women to remove it. For his part, Reid was actually standing up for moderate Muslims whose voices are drowned out by "extremist bullies." Constant grandstanding by non-elected Muslim  leaders may so polarize the country that it could spark the “Kulturkampf” that should all be desperate to avoid.