You are right about the quotation marks being ambiguous, it is paraphrasing not quotation, but that is essentially your meaning., that the muslim headscarf is the equivalent of our grandmothers', and it is not.

And as for religious meaning , my point again is that the Left that does not hesitate to ridicule some christian beliefs regarding sexual behavior, refuses to do the same with what is even worse beliefs in Islam, and insists on "respect" for those beliefs.

And maybe here there is a definition problem. "islamist" does not equate with "terrorist". It does equate with a fundamentalist, conservative form of Islam that makes evangelicals look like libertines.