The same Muslim woman who was banned from an “integration” class funded by the Quebec government for refusing to remove her Niqab, has been removed from another class for the same reason.

The immigrant from Egypt is launching a “human rights” complaint after provincial Immigration Department officials expelled her last fall from a government-sponsored language course after she refused to take off her niqab. The school had asked her first, citing problems of interacting in the classroom because of the face-covering.

I think most people will agree there is a sort of logical disconnect with a woman taking a cultural integration class, paid for by the taxpayers, and then refusing one of the most reasonable and basic requests to that integration.

Instructors in the community centre where the class was being offered said that they need to be able to look at the face of their students in order to correct their elocution and language pronunciation in class, which is of course impossible when one can only see the student’s eyes.

Apparently the student is, at times, amenable to reason. She removed her veil to have her student picture ID taken, and when speaking privately to a female teacher. After she refused to remove her veil, she was also offered the course online, but apparently did not take up the offer.

Even ordinarily sympathetic ears have said that Quebec has made a “reasonable attempt to accommodate her”, which means that a decision in favour of the immigrant is unlikely. But then again, this is the Quebec Human Rights Commission we’re talking about, an entity which has “evicted a mid-60s woman with a bum shoulder from her condo parking space and given the space instead to a 57-year-old woman who weighs 389 pounds.”