Christopher Hitchens describes his visit to Finsbury Park:

“Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.”

Vanity Fair, June 2007

Hitch further complains that “Blair’s government has appeased leading Muslim apologists by inviting them to join ‘commissions’ to investigate the 7/7 attacks, and thus awarding them credibility well beyond their deserts. A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair’s task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are ‘Zionist controlled’.”

See also the accompanying interview with Hitchens.

Maryam Namazie of the Worker Communist Party of Iran – who was the National Secular Society’s “secularist of the year” in 2005 – once again explains why, in the interests of “progress”, the right of Muslim women to dress as they choose must be suppressed:

“There are innumerable women and girls in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa to right here in the heart of Europe who know from personal experience what it means to be female under Islam – hidden from view, bound, gagged, mutilated, murdered, without rights, and threatened and intimidated day in and day out for transgressing Islamic mores. The veil, more than anything else, symbolises this bleak reality….

“I know our opponents often argue that there are many more pressing matters with regards to women’s status. Why all the fuss they ask? To me, it is like asking what all the fuss was about racial apartheid – or segregation of the races – in apartheid South Africa.

“… some of these apologists will concede that compulsory veiling must be opposed … but if it is a choice freely made than one must defend the ‘right’ to veil. I wholeheartedly disagree…. There may be women who ‘freely choose’ to genitally mutilate their daughters or immolate themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre but that does not mean that we must then defend the right of women to do so or defend the practice of Suttee or FGM….

“The veil is not a piece of cloth or clothing, though it is often compared to miniskirts or other ‘lewd’ forms of clothing the rest of us unveiled women seem to wear. Just as the straight jacket or body bag are not pieces of clothing. Just as the chastity belt was not a piece of clothing. Just as the Star of David pinned on Jews during the holocaust was not just a bit of cloth….

“And this is why the chador, burqa and neqab must be banned – to defend women’s rights…. Because it is unacceptable for women to be segregated in the 21st century; and for women to walk around in a mobile prison or body bag because religion deems that they be kept invisible…. The hijab or any conspicuous religious symbol must be banned from the state and education and relegated to the private sphere. This helps to ensure that government offices and officials from judges, to clerks, to doctors and nurses are not promoting their religious beliefs and are instead doing their jobs….

“Throughout history, progress and change have come about not by appeasing, apologizing or excusing reaction, but by standing up to it firmly and unequivocally. This is what has to be against Islam, political Islam and the veil. We have to state loud and clear that sexual apartheid has no place in the 21st century; enough is enough.”

Scoop, 26 March 2007

“Labour must be more principled at a time when the whole notion of equal rights for men and women is under attack from religious extremists.

“Since Jack Straw became the first mainstream politician to question the practice of wearing the niqab last autumn, it’s become clear that a small but vocal minority in this country no longer accepts the premise that women have exactly the same right to the enjoyment of public space as men.

“If women have to cover their faces with a mask (which is what niqab means in Arabic) whenever they leave the house, they are signalling their acceptance of conditional access to public space – and a Taliban theory of gender relations in which women are responsible for avoiding men’s accidental arousal.

“Neither of these propositions is compatible with a notion of universal human rights, and Labour ministers shouldn’t be afraid of saying so.”

Joan Smith in Tribune, 16 March 2007

From the standpoint of this sort of secularist fundamentalism, of course, the concept of human rights doesn’t include the right of Muslim women to dress as they choose, without being bullied by white male non-Muslim politicians.