Communist Party of Britain national membership organiser Geoff Bottoms told the party’s political committee on Wednesday evening that “new Labour ministers should stop demonising Britain’s Muslims.” He said that, instead, ministers should “start addressing the real causes of terrorism, which are rooted in the policies of British and US imperialism.”

Mr Bottoms added: “Jack Straw’s criticism of the full veil worn by a small minority of Muslims has nothing to do with women’s liberation, while Ruth Kelly’s threat to excommunicate Muslim organisations which criticise government foreign policy will do nothing to foster community cohesion,” adding that “her approach befits her membership of the ultra-right-wing Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei.”

The committee welcomed the stand taken by university vice-chancellors and students and lecturers’ unions against government plans for them to inform on Muslim and “Asian-looking” students to Special Branch.

Morning Star, 20 October 2006

A staff revolt at the Daily Star prevented publication of a spoof Islamic version of the paper called the “Daily Fatwa”.

The mock-up “Daily Fatwa”, which promised a “Page 3 Burkha Babes Special” and competitions to “Burn a Flag and Win a Corsa” and “Win hooks just like Hamza’s”, was prepared to run as page 6 in Wednesday’s edition of the Daily Star, one of the stable of newspapers owned by publisher Richard Desmond. The page also included a spoof leader column under the headline “Allah is Great” but left blank save for a stamp with the word “Censored”.

But shortly before the Star was due to go to press on Tuesday evening, concerned members of the National of Journalists (NUJ) called an emergency meeting in the 9th floor canteen of Desmond’s Northern & Shell building beside the River Thames. After 25 minutes, the NUJ chapel passed a motion saying that the article was “deliberately offensive” to Muslims.

Independent, 19 October 2006

“Muslim women who adopt the veil in Europe may simultaneously be seeking to affirm their religious identity while being determined to enter the public sphere as full and equal citizens. They are often also trying to change the cultural and political meaning of the veil in a contemporary context. For some it may be linked to patriarchal pressure, for others a symbol of identity and emancipation in a commodified and patriarchal society – and for many a response to a religious vocation. Feminist politics needs to be flexible and respond to these complexities. And for Muslim women their religion and even their gender are not the only, or the most grievous, focus of their oppression – their bodies have also been, and continue to be, a battleground for European and US imperialism.

“Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt in the late 19th century, famously justified British colonial rule by arguing that it could liberate Egyptian women from their oppressive veils…. When the US launched its war on terror in Afghanistan in 2001, George Bush glorified his aims by stating: ‘Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes … The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’ The US social anthropologists Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind have noted that the relationship between the neoconservative Bush administration and some US feminists was reciprocal and intimate….

“Those feminists who give well-meaning lectures to Muslim women on what they should think, say and wear are not in the end alone. There is a risk that their powerful female voices will inadvertently sustain another political discourse: the words and actions of an illustrious line of men who continue to justify their imperial ambitions on the bodies, often dead bodies, of Muslim women.”

Maleiha Malik in the Guardian, 19 October 2006