You wanted assimilation, you got it. Of a sort.

A SCHOOL was yesterday accused of MAKING teachers dress up as Asians for a day – to celebrate a Muslim festival.

Kids at the 257-pupil primary have also been told to don ethnic garb even though most are Christians.

The morning assembly will be open to all parents – but dads are BARRED from a women-only party in the afternoon because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men…

Yesterday a relative of one of the 39 others said: “Staff have got to go along with it – or let’s face it, they would be branded racist.

“Who would put their job on the line? They have been told they have to embrace the day to show their diversity. But they are not all happy.”

Seems … familiar somehow. The Brits don’t have an Establishment Clause so I don’t get to bore you here with a rant about how the courts read a “diversity”-based double standard into it that isn’t there. What this really is, in a sense, is the Laura Bush/headscarf debate transposed to a classroom setting: cutesy poo gesture of diplomacy or subtle form of indoctrination? Of course, having come to the Kingdom, Laura was the one expected to do the adapting; here you have the opposite happening. The lingering question, as is always the case with these things, is whether “multiculturalism” means anything broader than “understanding Islam.” Does the school hold Russian Day once a year? Hispanic Day?

Exit question: That sex-segregated assembly seems almost too bad to be true. Maybe it’s a cautionary tale?

Update: “Women covering their heads, women dressing modestly, I have no problem with at all. I think, however, that if you get to a stage where a woman is not able to express her personality because you can’t see her face, then you do start to have to ask whether this is something that is actually acknowledging the woman’s right to be a person in her own right.”