Wilders should be kept out
Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician notorious for making an anti-Muslim film called Fitna which was essentially a montage of all the worst stereotypes of violent Muslims, has been banned from entering the UK to...
Category: Europe
Well done to the anti-fascists in Cologne
I'd just like to say well-done to all those who routed the racists and fascists in Cologne who wanted to whip up some hatred against the local Turkish and Muslim population. It seems that...
The descendants of Nazis who became Jews
The Guardian today had this feature on descendants of Nazis, including a shirt-tail relative of Adolf Hitler, who became Jews, and in one case a rabbi, supposedly to cleanse themselves of the sins of...
But freedom for whom?
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a confused ramble in today's Independent, lamenting the fact that joining the European Union has decreased in popularity since 2002, when the figure was 70% in favour (by 2006, it was...
Why be a citizen?
A Moroccan Muslim woman has been refused citizenship in France for wearing the so-called burka and supposedly living in "total submission to her male relatives". Her initial refusal was in 2005, but she has...
Confusion over handshake issue at Irish awards
On Sunday, the Sunday Times reported that a Somali Muslim man lost an award he had been due to receive at a ceremony last Thursday at the Africa Centre in Dublin, Ireland, because he...
Review of London lecture on French hijab politics
This evening the American feminist academic Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of social science at Princeton, NJ, gave a lecture to promote her book, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, 2007) (reviewed in the...
What use is the Council of Europe?
George Monbiot, in today's Guardian, on the deafening silence of European politicians as Serbia takes the chairmanship of the Council of Europe, the body, entirely independent of the European Union, which runs the European...
Old Europe, new Europe
This is a shocking story from today’s (Tuesday’s) Guardian about a new wave of persecution of central Europe’s Roma (Gypsy) minority, which has started to take the form of destruction of Roma neighbourhoods and...
The latest native informer
Islamophobia Watch this weekend drew attention to the Sunday Times’ article on Nyamko Sabuni, Sweden’s answer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali who scarpered to the USA once doubt had been cast on her grounds for any status in the Netherlands. She is the “integration and equality” minister in the recently elected conservative government, and advocates such policies as adolescent girls being checked for evidence of having undergone genital mutilation, the criminalisation of arranged marriages, no state funding for religious organisations, and that “immigrants should learn Swedish and find a job”.
What Muslims have done for Holland
Feargus O'Sullivan, in yesterday's Guardian, wrote about the various "anti-delicacies" he tasted on his travels in Europe. This is what he found in the Netherlands: The quintessential Dutch food experience is the FEBO snack...
Far right tries to kick off in Austria
From A Fistful of Euros, a report on how Austria's interior minister used media reports and an academic study whose author has yet to draw his conclusions as the basis for accusing Austria's Muslim...