Veiled in Secrecy: Religious Observance or Cultural Apartheid?

I was away over the weekend when my above titled article was published here in my Troy Media (Canadian news agency) column (soon to be better branded, it seems)..so only just posting.

Here's a taster:

But public concern over the security issue, as Mosbacher confirms, isn’t simply that wearing the niqab-burqa suggests a “separation from mainstream society”; it is a key element in achieving it, by hiding the identity of an individual, which is anathema in an “open” democratic society.

American Muslim activist M. Zhuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, calls political Islamism “the root cause of Islamist terrorism” and a matter on which it is “time to take sides.”