A debate that has been flaring in the UK for the last year has come to a head today.  Aishah Azmi, 23, received compensation but did not succeed in her discrimination claim.  Ms Azmi argued that the school board that dismissed her because she refused to remove her head veil was unjust and discriminatory.   

To read the entire article, click here. 

  This is certainly a touchy issue and as much as we all want to ignore the issue, I think your only going to see more and more of these types of discussions until it is addressed and confronted. 

Immigrants, who travel to the UK or Canada in search of a better life still want to hold on to their cultural ties.  Understandable so.  But where is this line between cultural inheritance and cultural dog leech?

Example: Until a couple of years ago, I was an immigrant to Canada with my roots directly in England.  Soccer (football) is widely celebrated and watched in the U.K but not so much in Canada.  If I went to a bar and every TV was tuned to the hockey game and I demanded the management had equal sports coverage to allow for my soccer, would I be out of line would I be in my rights to say so?  How would you govern, enforce, refuse or allow that? 

If a woman demands she has her face covered because her old culture you are to cover your face to males because of religious ties; does she have the right to do so?  In her culture her religious ties and actions represent that she is lesser to males.  In Canada and more developed cultures we are taught that we are all equal. 

So what do you do?  Do we act like those we appose and say “You are in our world now, you can’t watch that here” or “in our world we don’t wear those, take it off!”  Do we oppress those in an act to liberate them because we think it just?  Isn’t that what they just departed from?