Yet Mr. Straw’s comments that the veil damages relations between people of different ethnic backgrounds has fired a furious debate, with Tony Blair and Romano Prodi, the British and Italian prime ministers, rising in agreement and Muslim leaders indignantly protesting. The issue in need of serious discussion is not the niqab — the veil that covers all but a woman’s eyes — but the larger question of the place of Europe’s Muslim minority.

Even if Mr. Straw is correct in describing the niqab (used by a small minority of European Muslims) as a barrier to assimilation, or to communication, it is still not the source of the current anxiety.

The problem is that the discovery of jihadists in Europe — whether those who plotted 9/11 or the Madrid or London bombings — has made non-Muslim Europeans far more suspicious of the large Muslim minorities among them and what they perceive as a self-imposed isolation. Those suspicions have, in turn, bolstered the arguments of a small minority of Muslim leaders who call for more isolation.

The real debate should be about the failure of European governments to address the sources of immigrant discontent — which include high unemployment and discrimination — and about the failure of Muslim leaders in the West to counter the rise of extremism in their communities.

The public attacks on a religious custom by Mr. Straw and Mr. Blair will only feed the suspicions of non-Muslim Europeans and the sense of stigma and segregation among European Muslims.