The Danish-Palestinian politician Asmaa Abdol-Hamid caused a stir in the Danish media yesterday when she said in an interview with the tabloid newspaper B.T. that she suppors the «resistance» movement in Iraq and has no problems with Danish troops being attacked. Asmaa Abdol-Hamid plans to run for the extreme-left Red-Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) in the next elections for the Danish Parliament (Folketinget).

A quote from the Daily Mail, 18 July 2007

A gay man who was refused a job by a bishop won his claim for discrimination. The landmark case leaves the Church of England facing a record bill for damages. A tribunal heard that John Reaney was turned down for a youth worker’s post after the Bishop of Hereford quizzed him for two hours about a previous gay relationship. The 42-year-old said the “humiliating” interview with the Right Rev Anthony Priddis left him in tears. [...] A hearing has yet to be arranged to set his compensation. There is no upper limit on payouts. [...]

A quote from Ralph Peters in an interview at Frontpage Mag, 19 July 2007

[T]he notion that Europe, the continent that's exported more death and destruction than any other, is going to just shuffle wimpily to its doom is crazy. The Europeans have been playing pacifist dress-up while [America] protected them, but, sufficiently threatened, they'll revert to their historical pattern – which is to over-react. Europe's Muslims may prove to be the real endangered species; after all, Europe's history of dealing with rejected minorities veers between genocide and, for the lucky, ethnic cleansing. For me, the question isn't whether Muslims will take over Europe, but whether Europe will simply expel them or kill any number of them first. Sound far-fetched? How would the Holocaust have sounded to an educated German (or Brit, or American) in 1932? Europe is a killer continent. When the chips are down, it will kill again.

A quote from Khudayr Taher, an Iraqi Shi’ite writer living in the U.S., at the liberal Elaph website, 4 July 2007

CENSORED [Under Belgian law we are not allowed to quote this]

A quote from Ed West in Catholic Herald, 18 July 2007

[Robert] Spencer’s popularity would not be possible without that other great fixture of our age: the internet. “The percentage of internet sales for my books are significantly higher than most,” he says, “many bookstores don’t sell them and people are afraid to talk about it, but there’s this whole underground on the internet that I would liken to that in the Soviet Union. Whenever there’s a straightjacket that stifles freedom of thought, people are going to react. The internet has shifted public opinion because it’s given the opportunity for the truth to be known.”

Last week, the Italian interior minister, Giuliano Amato, hosted a conference in Rome on “Islam and Integration.” Italy, one of Europe’s southern border states, has 1 million Muslims out of a population of 58 million people. Illegal immigrants arrive in Italy in huge numbers. According to a recent survey, the country could count almost 7 million Muslims by the end of the next decade.

The Italians, however, have a way of dealing with illegal immigrants. They regularly transform them into legal residents by granting them official papers. Since 1988 Italy has organized six amnesties for illegal aliens — the last one in 2006, when 500,000 people were given permission to stay. Most of them leave Italy shortly afterward. Since Italy belongs to the European Union and since the EU adheres to the principle of the free movement of persons, an amnesty gives immigrants the right to freely enter all EU member states. Italy allows the immigrants in so that they move out, to EU nations with more generous welfare systems.

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing turned up in the European Parliament to talk about the new Treaty. And as these Continental politicians are, he was incontinent about it.

The former President of the Convention which had drafted the rejected constitutional treaty told his adoring audience of MEPs that the new treaty “is the continuation of the Laeken process” and that “90% of the words are the same” as the European Constitution, which was rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands.

A quote from Giuliano Amato, the Italian Foreign Minister and former Vice President of the European Convention, at a conference in London, 12 July 2007 [audio]

They [EU leaders] decided that [the amended constitutional treaty] should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not [the European Constitution, which the voters rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands], that was the sort of perception. [...] In order to make our citizens happy, to produce a document that they will never understand [...] There is some truth [in it]. Because if this is the kind of document that the IGC [intergovernmental conference] will produce, any Prime Minister – imagine the UK Prime Minister – can go to the Commons and say ‘look, you see, it’s absolutely unreadable, it’s the typical Brussels treaty, nothing new, no need for a referendum.

A quote from Wouter Bos, the Dutch Finance Minister (and leader of the Dutch Labour Party), 16 July 2007

[We want to encourage Islamic banking.] In the first place because Islamic banking meets a demand from the Muslims living in the Netherlands. In the second place because we see an opportunity here for the Dutch financial sector. A third reason is that banning Islamic banking from the perspective of fighting terrorism will have a counter-productive effect. Denial of an actual need can lead to money-flows running via alternative channels out of the sight of the government.
 
More on Sharia banking:

Islamic Banking in Britain, 12 February 2007

First Sharia Bank in Switzerland, 8 October 2006

A quote from Roger Scruton in The American Conservative, 16 July 2007

The fourth reason the environmental movement has been appropriated by the Left is that it is a paradigm of a global cause. What is going wrong with the environment is going wrong everywhere. The world is an interlocking and mutually adapting system. If there is damage in one place, it will emerge in another. There seem to be no solutions to environmental problems that don't involve transgressing national boundaries and linking people across the globe. This connects to a longstanding desire on the Left to abolish nations and national governments—those centers of loyalty and power that seem to be at the heart of human conflicts—and to replace them with some kind of transnational, multinational, or even global government.