Via Pajamas Media, I see that Roger L. Simon is having anger management problems over the way hostage Faye Turney was forced to cover her head when she appeared on television:

I feel like smashing the television. One thing about those mullahs - no matter what their apologists in the West are like - they are not cultural relativists. They know how a woman should dress and the devil (literally) take those who disagree.

Of course this kind of battering ram approach to religion and women betrays an obvious psycho-sexual sickness in Islam that goes back to Mohammed that polite society dares not speak aloud. Polite society better wake up. Nothing could be more explicit. Not far away from dressing women like that is the freedom to rape and beat them. Also to remember is that this is just what Khomeini intended for all of us. This is the point of the Islamic revolution.

What particularly angers me is the insidious way the covering of women is promoted in the West. Knowing damned well that Westerners will never go along with mandatory covering, they hide behind multiculturalism, and market the covering of women as a "right." A "freedom," even. Clueless feminists go along with it, often conceding that as a form of identity politics, veiling is "empowering."

In secular Turkey, there's a showdown right now over whether veiling should be allowed. An article in today's Wall Street Journal explores the issue in detail:

Since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkey has enforced one of the strictest forms of state secularism in the Muslim world. To this day, for instance, Turkish laws ban students, teachers, judges and other state employees from wearing headscarves at work or in class. A decade ago, the military, which views itself as the ultimate guardian of the secular order, forced a staunchly Islamist prime minister out of office.

In the past seven years, the share of Turks who describe themselves as "fairly religious" has doubled to nearly half of the population, according to a recent survey by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation. And most people favor the lifting of the headscarf ban. At the same time, the study found that 77% of respondents believe democracy is the best form of government for Turkey.

But what Americans forget (and what I suspect a lot of Turks have forgotten), is that this talk of the "freedom" to wear a headscarf is a clever deception practiced by those who would deny women the freedom not to wear a headscarf. Ataturk and the founders of modern Turkey had reasons for the headscarf ban. What clueless Americans see as a "freedom" (which it is, technically), is really not a freedom at all, but a foot in the door for the precise opposite.

Might as well talk about the right to wear chains.