A review is being launched into health service guidelines on full-face veils to ensure that patients always have “appropriate face-to-face contact”, it has emerged.
Health minister Dan Poulter claims face coverings can be a barrier to good communication between healthcare professionals and patients. He has ordered a review of current advice and asked regulators to devise new uniform rules.
Outgoing Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has challenged Siv Jensen, leader of the anti-immigration Progress Party, to publicly apologise for using the term “sneak-islamization”.
“If the deputy chairperson is able to regret it in English, I assume that the party leader Siv Jensen can regret it in Norwegian,” Stoltenberg said on Tuesday after the Progress Party briefed international press on its policies.
Ketil Solvik-Olsen, the party’s deputy leader, yesterday told a meeting with foreign journalists that Jensen’s claim that Norway faced the threat of “sneak-islamization” had been unfortunate. But Jensen on Tuesday evening stood by her provocative past statements.
“I’m not going to apologize for that and I and the Progress Party will continue to fight the emergence of such radical forces and the ideas they advocate,” she wrote in an email to VG newspaper.
Today’s Daily Mail – a newspaper which of course has a long history of inciting bigotry against minority communities of recent migrant origin – carries yet another contribution to the niqab “debate”.
We’ve already heard Melanie Phillips’ views on this “sinister and intimidating black-out”, as she puts it, and now we have an article headlined “Why are my fellow feminists shamefully silent over the tyranny of the veil, asks JULIE BINDEL”.
Mariam Elba provides a list.
This is the front page of today’s Sun. The accompanying editorial is behind a paywall so we reproduce it below.
In contrast to yesterday’s rant by Trevor Kavanagh, the editorial strikes what is, for the Sun, a tone of reasoned moderation.
It comes out firmly against a complete ban on wearing the veil in public, though that stance is hardly going to have any impact on the rights of Muslim women, given that there isn’t the slightest prospect of such a law being introduced in the UK for the foreseeable future.
The Sun even admits that women who wear the veil are not necessarily oppressed or acting under compulsion: “While the Taliban used the burka to suppress women in Afghanistan, those wearing them here are mainly young – and doing so by choice. They see physical modesty as key to their faith. And they already feel ‘liberated’ … from being judged on their appearance.”
Writing in the Toronto Star, Ihsaan Gardee of the National Council of Canadian Muslims criticises the Canadian government’s failure to take any action, or even issue a statement, in response to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s appearance at a public meeting organised by the far-right Jewish Defence League.
Today’s Sun features a characteristic rant by Trevor Kavanagh on the topical subject of the Muslim veil. Those familiar with his style will know what to expect. Informed analysis, nuanced argument? Forget it. The ignorant bigotry of a bar-room bore – that’s more Trev’s sort of thing.
There is I suppose some entertainment value in the spectacle of a man who is so incapable of self-reflection that he loudly denounces women being treated as objects and male property … five pages on from a photo of a semi-naked woman pouting at the camera.
A Conservative MP has sparked a Twitter backlash after she said Islamic veils should be banned in all schools – suggesting they were “deeply offensive”. Dr Sarah Wollaston, MP for Totnes in Devon, said the niqab was “making women invisible” in a string of online comments.
She wrote on Twitter: “The niqab should be banned within schools & colleges; how on earth do they promote equality when they collude with making women invisible?” Moments later, the MP posted another message saying: “A general ban on the niqab simply won’t happen in the UK but that doesn’t mean that it should be endorsed by schools or courts.”
The government should consider banning young Muslim women from wearing the veil in public places, a Liberal Democrat minister has said. The Home Office minister, Jeremy Browne, called for a national debate on whether the state should step in to prevent young women having the veil imposed upon them. His intervention came after a row erupted over the decision by Birmingham Metropolitan college to drop a ban on the wearing of full-face veils amid public protests.
Under the headline “The niqab is a worrying symbol of segregation” the Sunday Telegraph has an editorial supporting the prohibition of the veil in some circumstances. While it stops short of calling for complete ban, the Telegraph states that “facial communication is important in some parts of the public sphere, and … the relevant authorities should be at liberty to require it if they wish”. Like the Express, the paper thinks that Birmingham Metropolitan College capitulated to PC pressure by changing its rules to allow students to wear the niqab.
For the Sunday Telegraph the question of whether Muslim women should be allowed to cover their faces in public is apparently the issue of the week, because in addition to an editorial the paper also features a double-page spread on the niqab.
An article by the paper’s chief reporter Robert Mendick brackets the Birmingham Metropolitan College controversy with an ongoing legal dispute over whether a Muslim woman should be allowed to wear her niqab in court. According to Mendick, these are just two components of a Muslim-leftist plot: “An alliance of Islamic groups and Left-wing activists have been accused of conspiring to put pressure on institutions to overturn existing bans on the wearing of full-face coverings.”