Fold your hands, child, you walk like a peasant

Here we go again. Jack Straw, Britain's former foreign secretary, has suggested that it would help break down barriers between communities if the faces of Muslim women were not obscured by the Niqab. He wrote in a local newspaper that, in his duties as MP for Blackburn, a town in Lancashire with a large Muslim population, he asks Muslim women to remove their veils when speaking with him. He also stressed that he would never do so without another woman present and that, by and large, people have been happy to oblige.

The results have been... predictable. "Islamophobe!" cried a fair chunk of the Muslim lobby; "Islamofascist thought police in action!" came the retort from the right; "He's just lining himself up for the Labour deputy leadership race!" yell the politics pages; "Why can't we talk about these things without it descending into this &$@*ing hysteria?" weeps just about everyone else.

The debate has focused on a relatively small number of issues: whether headscarfs represent freedom or oppression for Muslim women; whether Straw was being naive or deliberately inflammatory; whether Islam requires such extreme coverings or whether women need merely 'dress modestly', which as as far as the Koran goes on this particular subject.

There is one thing that most of the coverage seems to have missed, though, that I only know of because of the Sharpener writers' mailing list - and that seems to be the key to the whole debate.

Jack Straw is deaf in his right ear. He relies partly on being able to see someone's face to make out what they are saying.

And whatever the myriad benefits or disadvantages of face coverings, one thing they are unequivocally useless as is tools to assist lip-reading.

Why this hasn't featured more prominently in the debate I don't know. Best explanation I've got is that there are plenty of people among both the Muslim and anti-multiculturalism lobbies who would rather be throwing rocks at each other than having the rational debate that Straw was asking for.

...we're screwed, aren't we?

ObLink: Sunny has a nice overview of the issues on this one.