US right-winger provides advice on multiculturalism

Under the heading “Britain confronts militant Islam”, a writer for the US right-wing/neocon NRO offers his take on current debates in the UK over multiculturalism. Regarding the veil he observes:

“If this wretched garment, in at least its more stringent forms, has more to do with misogyny than piety, so the hostility it provokes owes less to outraged feminism than to the mounting unease felt by many Europeans at the presence of the increasingly assertive and increasingly extremist Islam rising within their midst…. there is something about the very appearance of the veil (and I am here referring to the burka and the only marginally less appalling nikab, a get-up that generously allows a clear view of the wearer’s eyes) that is alien, dehumanizing, and, in the context of Europe’s current troubles, thoroughly ominous. Little more than walking shrouds, these women seem like the harbingers both of future theocracy and the slaughter that comes in its wake.”

As for the suggestion that racial hatred legislation should be adequately reinforced in order to defend Muslims: “That’s madness. That’s cowardice. That’s appeasement.”

National Review Online, 11 December 2006