Sorry, couldn’t resist a lame veil pun. There’s something about the veil that brings it out. I defy you to find many newspaper articles about the latest veil story that aren’t going down that route for a headline, so I felt obliged to join in.

I don’t feel obliged to join in the nonsense debate about Muslim schoolgirls wearing the veil to school or not. See story on today’s BBC. It’s just more islamophobia as far as I can see.

What is about the veil that gets everyone’s backs up? OK, I find the whole belief system behind it to be dire and depressing. The combination of extreme sexism and religious fervour is always a winner.

However, it’s just an item of clothing. Teenage girls who choose to wear it are trying to establish some sort of identity, in the same way that the girls who dress as footballer’s wives, crack hos, goths or girls next door are. It’s part of being a teenager. The veil lets them annoy their schoolteachers (always a winner) while believing they have the moral high ground (different type of winner, but just as much a part of adolescence.) Is it really more offensive to people that soem girls choose to cover themselves in tents than any other things.

In most cases, people grow up and see things differently from the way they appeared to their teenage selves. You would think that a few years living in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia would probably quench the desire to be veiled as much as anything.

The only reason I can see for banning the veil in schools is that it would deprive those girls who want to resist cultural pressure to wear it of an unarguable excuse. This is the strongest argument for such a ban, indeed the only one worth considering.

The deeper problem is the issue of why veils stir up such passions in the non-Muslim population? Is it more in your face (really poor pun) than a Jesus loves you t-shirt. Do we have a problem with people wearing crosses?

Dare I say that it’s an ugly combination of sexism and religious prejudice that leads everyone to treat veiled women as somehow the representation of evil? (Women in the veil are now often considered to be really disguised male terrorists.) Jack Straw’s notorious rant about his constituents removing their veils was the Trojan Horse that allowed in a free-for-all demonising of muslim women.

(I wouldn’t argue about teachers, certainly not the teaching assistant who seems to have taken the job just to make some comedy political point about the veil and what would happen if a male teacher came in… Small children can’t be expected to understand instructions from someone when they can’t see their movements and expressions. Not to mention being a really poor role model for little girls.)

If we consider that women are often oppressed in Islam – and I certainly do, although Islam has no monopoly in this noble tradition – doesn’t that make us the worst type of bullies- picking on the already victimised.

In any case, how can suppressing the expression of belief advance the cause of rationality? Making martyrs always brings more converts to fanatical world views. Is this the objective?