Long Black Veil: Tony Blair's Deadly Game of Muslim-Bashing
For centuries in Britain, each sentence of death was accompanied by a strange ritual. Before handing down the verdict, the judge would first take a piece of black silk cloth and put it on his head. With this rather bizarre and ancient drapery covering his powdered wig - itself a relic, a cultural fossil carried into modern times - he would then render the prisoner into the hangman's care.
In such a guise, the black cloth once represented the full, dread measure of state power. Today, however, a cloth of similar size, shape and color - worn across the faces of a small number of some of the most vulnerable members of British society - has become a target of that same dread power, after Britain's high and mighty unleashed a sudden, thunderous sneak attack on the nation's Muslim minority, centering the campaign around the tabloid-ready symbol of the veil.
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