The Labour Party's intervention represents the liberal version of Islamophobia, a complement to the right-wing variant, which has included Pope Benedict's speech portraying Islam as a violent religion, George W. Bush's tirade against "Islamofascism," and the publication of racist anti-Islamist cartoons by a right-wing Danish newspaper.

In Italy, another leading liberal, Prime Minister Romano Prodi, followed Blair in speaking out against the niqab.

Meanwhile, British authorities reported several incidents in which women were verbally harassed for wearing the niqab or a head covering known as the hijab, following Straw's comments. There were violent attacks as well, including an October 21 assault carried out by three men on those attending prayers at a mosque in the city of Manchester.

The same day, right-wing media amplified Straw and Blair's attacks on Islam, with the Daily Express tabloid running a front-page photo of a woman in a niqab under the massive headline "BAN IT!" A 24-year-old school teaching assistant, Aishah Azmi, won $2,000 in a labor tribunal case involving her suspension for wearing a niqab in class--but her complaints of discrimination and harassment were dropped.

The backdrop for all this is a series of raids and arrests of Muslims since August involving an alleged plot to hijack British airliners--even though they had taken no action toward doing so.

The Labour Party's role in stoking Islamophobia has given political cover for neo-Nazis and far-right politicians in Europe, who have already made anti-Islamism their focus, as a brief look across the continent makes clear:

France

Four Muslim baggage-handlers at Charles De Gaulle Airport recently lost their jobs when a local government revoked their security clearances.

The crackdown follows publication of a book--by Philippe de Villiers, the candidate of the right-wing Movement for France (MPF) party in next year's presidential elections--that claims to detail Muslim "infiltration" of the airport. "I am the only politician who tells the French the truth about the Islamization of France," he told an interviewer earlier this year.

A police union affiliated with de Villiers' MPF recently called for more weapons to fight what it called an ongoing "intifada" in the heavily Muslim immigrant suburbs of Paris, which erupted in riots a year ago after two youths died while being chased by police.

De Villiers is positioning himself as a more palatable alternative to National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Holocaust-denying, anti-immigrant neo-Nazi who came in second in the 2002 presidential election.

Islamophobia has been a staple of French politics for years, with parties of the mainstream right and left backing the ban of the hijab of public schools in 2004. The mainstream right is also counting on anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant politics to maintain control of the presidency, as Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy combines his law-and-order policies in the Paris suburbs with new laws cracking down on undocumented immigrants.

Germany

The neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NDP) scored its biggest success ever in September's election in the depressed Eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, giving Germany's extreme right representation in four German states.

A few weeks later, Ronald Pofalla, the head of Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, wrote a newspaper column claiming that "the problem of religiously motivated violence is today almost exclusively a problem of Islam." Earlier this year, the eighth of Germany's 16 states voted to ban the hijab in public schools.

Belgium

The far-right Velaams Belang nearly captured control of the Antwerp city government in mid-October on an openly Islamophobic platform, winning 33.5 percent of the vote, compared to 35 percent assembled by a Socialist coalition.

Bulgaria

Volen Siderov, candidate of the ultranationalist Ataka (Attack) party, bested the country's other right-wing parties by winning 22 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections October 22. Running on a platform of banning Turkish parties and cracking down on the Roma people, known as gypsies, Siderov will contest a runoff vote with incumbent president Georgi Parvanov of the Socialist Party.

Russia

The growing Nazi and far right are mobilizing behind the Movement Against Illegal Immigration--and the organization's politics recently got the blessing of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Following raids and mass deportation of Georgians after Russia's spy scandal involving that former republic of the USSR, Putin gave a speech in which he declared that Russians are being "terrorized" by gangs of "criminals" from the Muslim countries of former USSR republics in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the large Muslim population of Russia itself.

Islamophobia has replaced anti-Semitism as the focus of the European far right, according to Glyn Ford, a British member of the European Parliament and author of a book on neo-fascism in Europe. "Europe is in danger of seeing its extreme-right parties move into the mainstream," he said, adding, "Islamophobia has become the prejudice of the day, but the threat from the extreme right is real and it is found across the European Union."

Lee Sustar can be reached at: lsustar@ameritech.net

The iconic images of women throwing off their burqas after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 were always a fiction. Except among a small elite in Kabul, the overwhelming majority of women in Afghanistan are still forced to cover their entire bodies and faces.

The report's researchers found that very little has changed. Between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced. As many as 57 per cent of girls are married off below the age of 16, some as young as six. Because of the custom of paying a bride price, marriage is essentially a financial transaction, and girls a commodity.

The custom of baad, when girls and women are exchanged to settle debts and disputes, is still widely practised. The women are not treated as proper wives, but in effect are slave workers for their husbands.

Honour killing is also still widespread. Women are killed for dishonouring their families through "crimes" such as even being seen associating with a man. A family member kills the woman.

Even women who have been raped cannot report the crime because they risk being prosecuted for having sex outside marriage.

The Taliban were vilified for denying girls education, but even now only 19 per cent of Afghan schools are for girls and only 5 per cent of girls of secondary school age are enrolled.

And the West cannot blame the Taliban, as many of the abuses take place in the north and west, where the Taliban are not active.

In the north-east, where the Taliban never had control, a woman dies every 20 minutes in childbirth.

After that agreement, the U.S. military steered more than $100 million in sub-contracts to the Akaev family's fuel monopoly, according to U.S. contractors who oversaw the payments and transactions. That windfall to the Akaev family businesses equaled about 5 percent of Kyrgyzstan's annual gross national product, according to the contractors.

After Akaev fled the country, that air base, called the Manas, or "Ganci" airbase, was at the heart of an immense diplomatic struggle as relations between the U.S. and Kyrgyzstan soured. Kyrgyz officials alleged the U.S. funds going to Akaev's family should have been going to the state treasury instead.

This summer, after months of wrangling, the U.S. finally announced a deal to pay $150 million over the next year to various Kyrgyz projects, and the Kyrgyz government has agreed to keep the base open.

The "Ganci" air base has its roots post-9/11. Named after Peter Ganci, a New York City firefighter who lost his life in the World Trade Center attacks, the base hosts tankers and other planes, and operates as a transfer facility for troops. The United States needs it because last year the Uzbekistan government closed the American base in its country.

Even before the base opened, Akaev was a complex figure, seen alternatively as a reformer and as a dictator. He became president in 1990, in the former Soviet Republic, and was reelected in 2000 in a landslide vote that the State Department said was "marred by serious irregularities."

But after 9/11, and after he permitted the air base to open, he became a close U.S. ally.

'A brilliant man'
He was invited to the White House and photographed with President Bush on Sept. 23, 2002. The two leaders sealed their partnership during the meeting, calling for transparent open government, democracy, as well as "reducing corruption, and enhancing the Kyrgyz Republic's strong record on economic reform."

Three years later, Akaev's family was accused of siphoning massive amounts of money out of Kyrgyzstan. The FBI report obtained by NBC News says that "an international law enforcement investigation is underway targeting as many as 175 entities associated with the Akaev organization." The report cites allegations of a "vast amount of potential criminal activities." The trail, according to the FBI, even led to the U.S., where the Akaev family was connected to one American "known to have formed over 6,000 U.S. shell companies for organized crime factions, weapons and drug traffickers and cyber criminals."

American attorney Scott Horton was in Kyrgyzstan during the base negotiations, and knew Akaev.

"He was an academic, a brilliant man," says Horton. "But we began to see a dark side about Askar Akaev. He and his family and his extended clan mates decided to take advantage of their position of power for personal financial gain."

Dollar figures
Noted economist Anders Aslund knew President Akaev personally, and prepared annual economic reviews of Kyrgyzstan for the United Nations Development Program. He says the scale of corruption by Akaev's family was massive.

"One can say that half a billion to $1 billion was probably what the family amassed," says Aslund.

But if the family businesses were making money off the state, they truly encountered a bonanza when the U.S. air base opened in 2002, according to sources involved in Kyrgyzstan and the negotiations, and records obtained by NBC News.

Fuel subcontracts draw attention
Two companies owned by the president's relatives received $120 million in military fuel subcontracts, according to the prime contractor. The two companies were Aalam Services, which was controlled by President Akaev 's son-in-law, according to the FBI records, and Manas International, which was widely known to belong to Akaev's son, Aider Akaev.

"Tens of millions of dollars were paid by our Pentagon into businesses that were controlled by the President of Kyrgyzstan and his family," says Horton.

Aslund says ownership of Manas and Aalam was common knowledge. Neither company could be reached for comment.

The first contractor that the Pentagon hired to provide fuel in Kyrgyzstan says it notified military officials of the link between the president's family and Aalam and Manas.

Later, in 2002, when the Pentagon had a competitive bidding selection to choose a new contractor, a company named Red Star Enterprises won. It received a total of more than $240 million over the next several years, and tells NBC News it paid $120 million to the two firms.

In an e-mail to NBC News, a company official said: "These companies were used because DESC [the defense agency handling fuel contracts] directed all bidders to use them since they were the only registered companies to provide services."

'Tulip Revolution'
In March 2005, Akaev was ousted from power in an uprising now known as the "Tulip Revolution." And that is when all the alleged corruption started to unravel. The new Kyrgyz government argued that the state treasury received little if any direct benefit from U.S. funds. A Pentagon spokesman says that the U.S. paid a yearly total of $2.7 million in fees at the airport.

The Pentagon says any corruption was not its fault.

"We are aware of the allegations of the current Kyrgyz government," said Lt. Col. Joe Carpenter in a statement to NBC News referring to the allegations, "that former Kyrgyz regime leadership may have misappropriated funds from U.S. payments for goods or services," and added any "misappropriation of funds is an internal Kyrgyz matter. All DoD contracts for goods and services in Kyrgyzstan were negotiated in accordance with U.S. laws and DoD contracting regulations."

The Pentagon says it is helping the Kyrgyz government investigate, by providing U.S. documents.

The Kyrgyz could use the help, because in a strange twist, there were several U.S. connections to both Manas and Aalam. Both firms had bank accounts in the U.S., according to the FBI, and the banks reported that "Manas and Aalam are tied to transactions with arms traffickers, Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and a myriad of suspicious U.S. shell companies associated with the Akaev Organization."

The FBI refused to confirm whether there is an ongoing investigation into the Akaev matter, citing a policy of not confirming or denying investigations.

Akaev is living in Moscow, and refused to comment for this story, or answer questions. Asked for comment, Galina Scripkina, who identified herself as Akaev's attorney, said she could not answer questions concerning him.