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What really motivated Straw
Jack Straw, a wormy, chestless leftist who would have fit right in with the Clinton administration, is still a human being, and as such he gets uncomfortable when a female constituent comes into his office to talk with him and her entire head and face are concealed behind a freaky covering. I think it is Jack Straw’s basic humanity that has reacted against the inhuman and frightening apparition of Islam. But he cannot put his discomfort in quite those terms. So he describes the niqab (the linked article provides a useful glossary of Muslim female head coverings) as something that is harmful to interpersonal communication, to community relations, and to cultural equality, not as something that is inherently unacceptable in Western society. Yet even for his minimalist, liberal, and merely human reaction to something that is just plain inhuman and illiberal, Straw is being left to blow about in the wind by many of his liberal political colleagues. Fortunately, 90 percent of the public agree with him. However, before we get our hopes up that Britain is finally discussing the forbidden topic of the Muslim veil and thus showing some guts, I would underscore the fact that all Straw said was that when Muslim women are conversing with him in his office, he asks to see their face. That this tiny assertion of normality against freakiness set off such an uproar reveals, not a society that is at last grappling with a difficult issue, but a society that is utterly lost.
Melanie Phillips is also astonished that it is Jack Straw of all people, hitherto “the embodiment of appeasement and cultural cringe before the forces of Islamic extremism,” who has set off this flap. Email entry |