In March this year, native Dutch residents of the city of Utrecht rioted to protest against harassment by Muslim youths and government inaction to stop this. The authorities immediately suppressed the riots by sealing off the area and installing surveillance cameras to control Dutch non-Muslims, but they have done virtually nothing to address the underlying problem of Muslim violence. And this is far from unique to the Netherlands.

Belgium has 10.5 million (legal) inhabitants. About 9 million of them are indigenous Belgians – of whom 6 million are Dutch-speaking Flemings and 3 million French-speaking Walloons. Belgium also has 900,000 legal aliens, and 650,000 so-called “new Belgians” – foreigners who acquired the Belgian nationality since 1980. About 0.5 million Belgian inhabitants are Muslims, of whom 265,000 Moroccans and 155,000 Turks. According to the security services, almost 2% of the Muslims (some 8,000 people) sympathize with Islamist extremists.

Belgian homosexual activists have brought charges against Mgr André-Mutien Léonard, the Roman-Catholic bishop of Namur, for homophobia, a criminal offence in Belgium according to the country’s 2003 Anti-Discrimination Act. In an interview last April in the Walloon weekly Télé Moustique, the bishop is said to have described homosexuals as “abnormal” people.

According to Michel Graindorge, the activists’ lawyer, the bishop intended to “stigmatize” homosexuals, whose “identity and dignity is debased from the moment that the bishop considers them to be abnormal.” Mr Graindorge warned for the dangers of such stigmatization, which he claims leads to  “the fate the Nazis reserved for [homosexuals].” Homosexual activists claim that the Nazis sent homosexuals to extermination camps.

A quote from Daniel Hannan at his blog, 24 June 2007

The EU is undemocratic, not by oversight, but because it was designed that way. The patriarchs of federalism – Monnet, Schuman, de Gasperi and the rest – understood that their scheme to merge the ancient kingdoms and republics of Europe would never come off if each successive transfer of power to Brussels had to be approved by the national electorates. That is why they designed a structure which vests supreme power with unelected civil servants. And that is why, in Brussels, the worst of all crimes is “populism” - which, when you think about it, is another word for “democracy”: the readiness of elected representatives to do what their constituents want.

One of the truisms of war, politics and other contested areas of life, is that it always serves you well to look at what the other side are saying or doing. This is particularly apposite when they the other side are replete with confidence. To that end I bring you a collection of quotes from yesterday’s European parliamentary Constitutional Affairs Committee.

All the Constitution is there! Nothing is missing!
Jean-Louis Bourlanges (Liberal, France)

A quote from the German press agency DPA, 26 June 2007

Violence at schools in immigrant-dominated districts of Berlin has soared in recent months, […] The violence reached a peak recently when two masked youths burst into a classroom at the Dag Hammerskjoeld School in the city’s Tempelhof district to attack a 58-year-old woman teacher. One beat the terrified teacher about the head and body with a steel rod, while the other tried to make off with her handbag. Pupils intervened, driving the intruders from the classroom. Curiously, the teacher was discussing the great late Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi’s political philosophy of “non-violence” at the time.

A quote from David Warren at his blog, 23 June 2007

The most frightening proposal [in the forthcoming EU Treaty] is the one least appreciated: to create a European “charter of fundamental rights” that will accomplish the precise opposite of what it claims. It will swing the iron claw of “progressive thought” through the soft flesh of human variety, enterprise, and freedom, on an unprecedented scale.

A quote from Mark Steyn at The Corner, 26 June 2007

One of the ever widening differences between the US and Europe is that in the former (despite the best efforts of McCain-Feingold) there is stilll a First Amendment while in Europe it's ever more assumed that there is no such thing as a "right to free speech": instead it's the state's role to serve as the arbiter of approved speech.

A quote from Richard North at EUreferendum, 26 June 2007

First Ireland, then Finland and now Spain. Jose Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, joins the growing list of EU politicians who is claiming that the EU constitution is back, [...]. He is backed by Diego Lopez Garrido, the parliamentary spokesman for the Spanish Socialist Party, who says that, "99 per cent" of the original constitution had survived,” going one better (nine percent, actually) than Bertie Ahern, the Irish premier.

A similar view prevails in the EU parliament where, says The Telegraph, there was almost an air of celebration.

A quote from Reuters, 25 June 2007

Germany has barred the makers of a movie about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler from filming at German military sites because its star Tom Cruise is a Scientologist, the Defence Ministry said on Monday. [...] The U.S. actor has been cast as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the Nazi dictator in July 1944 with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.

Defence Ministry spokesman Harald Kammerbauer said the film makers “will not be allowed to film at German military sites if Count Stauffenberg is played by Tom Cruise, who has publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult”.