‘Wrong from head to toe: a ridiculous and ominous decision in Britain’

“In the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgment than that recently given by Lord Justice Brooke of the British Court of Appeal. It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization.”

Theodore Dalrymple expresses outrage over the Shabina Begum case. “No expressed desire by a child or young woman to wear traditional clothing such as the jilbab can be taken as arising from free choice – even if, in any given instance, it is the result of such a choice – because of the oppressive nature of the subculture.”

National Review, 28 March 2005