The last Straw

Jack Straw, former British Foreign Secretary, and now ordinary Member of Parliament, has caused a stir in the UK media by admitting that he asks Muslim women constituents who are visiting his office to remove their veil. He only does this if the veil is over their face or if they are wearing an all-encomapssing cover such as a burka or chador, that only leaves the eyes visible (although often thru a lattice). He quite rightly says that such a face covering impedes communication, he often cannot hear their voices (and they often have accents) and he cannot see their reaction to his replies. He also says that he always has another woman present when he interviews Muslim women and if the woman refuses to remove the veil or garment he does not insist. This seems like a very reasonable and gentlemanly way to proceed.
I remember, the first time I encountered this phenomenon of women completely covered was in India, when we arrived at Bombay airport with a crowd of tribesmen returning from the Hajj in Arabia, and how all the women were dressed completely in black, like large crows. Then in Hyderabad, a largely Muslim city, I saw many women wearing strange metal contraptions on their faces, that covered most of their features, with eye-holes, like masks that made them look like robots. Some of these contraptions were made of gold, so it was very strange. I was later told that many of these young women were being sent to Arabia to be wives of older Saudi men, in effect they were sold as second or third wives, a kind of legal slavery.
I totally reject the concept that this is some kind of religious belief. Certainly female modesty can be included in religious beliefs, but the wearing of these all-encompassing coverings and scarves can only be understood as a means of social control. In fact, as Straw mentions, many Islamic scholars do not attribute the covering of women to a religious requirement laid down by Mohammed in the Koran, but rather to tradition (hadith) that has grown over the centuries. Similarly the cruel clitoridecomy practiced on girls in many Islamic countries is not truly Islamic, but is based on local and tribal cultural practices.
For example, blacks in the south of the US were not allowed to mix with whites, they were kept on the back of the bus and not allowed to bathe in the same pools and drink from the same faucets. Were these religious beliefs? No, they were means to keep blacks segregated and inferior. Similarly the means used by men in Muslim societies to control women have the same goals, and in fact most other societies worked this way in the past. But the emncipation of women in the West, just as the emancipation of blacks, made these social practices obsolete. So let's not be taken in by the so-called religious aspects of these cruel cultural controls.
Straw was right in taking this stand and publicizing it. But, he is up against a lot of opposition, amid a welter of criticisms that he is a racist to just plain non-PC. That is the last straw. We must all support his stand and expand upon it. There needs to be a back-swell of reaction that it is perfectly proper to tell Muslims that to have their women in "purdah" is not acceptable in western society, and if they want to do that then they will have to go back to where they came from to practice it there. In France they have banned scarves in schools as being against the tradition of secular society, that seeks equality for all. In the UK, they have tended to be more tolerant of religious differences, but that is a multi-cultural trap. Certain cultural traditions that are incompatible with the free society, such as forced marriages of underage girls, are considered legally unacceptable. The total covering of women should be another of these culturally unacceptable practices. It should not be allowed in progressive western societies, where all women should be emancipated!