Fr Pierre Brunissen has been savagely knifed in Turkey – the fourth attack on Catholic priests in that country this year. His attacker has apparently complained about Fr Brunissen’s missionary activities. It is unlikely that Fr Brunissen was, in fact, proselytizing — the Catholic Church is not especially active in missionary work in Muslim nations, for the simple reason that it’s generally a swift road to death for both converter and the converted. Muslim orthodoxy prescribes death for the apostate. (Indeed, one of the cardinal problems with modern Islamism is the breadth of acts which constitute “apostasy” in its eyes: in a Turkish context, we read in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow that Islamist youth confuse ordinary adolescent lovesickness with this act.)

University professors in the Netherlands are not allowed to voice “unscientific” opinions that are too critical of Islam. One such opinion is the statement of Pieter W. van der Horst that “the Nazis’ irrational hatred of the Jews has been adopted in the contemporary Islamic world.” At a meeting today in Amsterdam a large majority of the chancellors of the Dutch universities agreed that “academic freedom at universities should be limited.” Only two of them, Frans Zwarts of Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and Taede Sminia of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said that a retiring professor should be allowed to express a personal opinion in his valedictory lecture.

The last significant revival of classical paganism in Hellenic lands came in the reign of Julian the Apostate. Now, it seems that there’s another underway. The South African Mail & Guardian reports that thousands of devotees of the Greek gods of antiquity are gathering in Athens to ape the half-remembered rites of millenia past. Unlike the prior revival, this one is not driven by any meaningful numbers of Hellenes, but by foreigners, most of whom hail from the secular West.

This week, for the very first time, a court in Europe sentenced nine members of the same family for the honour killing of a female relative. Honour killings, where a woman is murdered for the shame that she is said to have brought on her family, are a growing phenomenon in Western Europe. In December 2005 Nazir Afzal, a spokesman of Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service stated that the United Kingdom has had “at least a dozen honour killings” between 2004 and 2005. British police are investigating more than 100 cases of women who died under mysterious circumstances.  Germany was shocked last year by the murder of Hatin Surucu, a young Turkish woman who was killed by three brothers because she was “a whore who lived like a German.” A German women’s organization states that “There are no concrete statistics available, but unofficial estimates [of honour killings] are considered to be high. We get calls from women caught in difficult situations almost every two weeks.”

Thou feedest them with the bread of tears and givest them tears to drink in great measure.

The front page of all Belgian newspapers today had the pictures of two little girls. “Murdered” the captions said. Nathalie Mahy (10) and Stacy Lemmens (7) disappeared on 9 June. Their bodies were discovered yesterday. Exactly ten years ago, before Stacy and Nathalie were born, the Belgian papers also brought pictures of murdered girls. Their names were Melissa Russo (8) and Julie Lejeune (8), victims of the notorious pedophile Marc Dutroux.

Stacy and Nathalie were abducted in Liège, the largest city of Wallonia, the Socialist-dominated French-speaking part of Belgium. Melissa and Julie were from the same city, often referred to as “Palermo on the Meuse.” According to Urban Audit Liège has the highest crime rate of all European cities (EU27), with 256.13 recorded crimes per 1,000 population in 2001.

Eric Hoffer, the “Longshoreman Philosopher” has revealed that his best ideas came during work. (Indeed, he was a dockworker when he developed his best seller The True Believer). The insight to be shared struck me while I absolved my daily six mile in-line-skating that serves as a break in my weight-lifting program. Since getting to the run’s venue involves some motor biking, the brain’s creative nerve-endings are truly stimulated. Or could it be the anticipation of the beer that is the reward of the fulfillment of the day’s business?

The Belgian state is no longer able to guarantee the security of its citizens. On Saturday afternoon Guido Demoor, a 54-year old Flemish train conductor on his way to work, was kicked to death by six “youths” on a crowded bus near Antwerp’s Central Station. The incident recalls the rush-hour murder ten weeks ago of Joe Van Holsbeeck, 17 years of age, in a crowded Brussels Central Station on 12 April.

Last Thursday the Saeima, the Parliament of Latvia, upset the European Union by refusing to accept a labour bill that would make it a criminal offense for a private person or company to refuse to employ a gay person. The Saeima only approved the non-discrimination clauses, which Brussels had told the country to accept, after removing discrimination on the basis of “sexual preference” from the discriminations listed in the bill. The Latvian parliamentarians insisted on the right of private employers to turn down people whose moral behaviour they reject.

Roger Scruton

Yesterday evening Roger Scruton delivered a speech in Antwerp. He spoke at the invitation of the Vlaams Belang (VB), which is Antwerp’s, Flanders’ and Belgium’s largest party. The VB strives for the independence of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium. It is also the only Eurosceptic party in Belgium, a country that prides itself on being the model of a pan-European state.

I am not a member of the VB, though my wife is a member of parliament for it. However, since Roger and I are longstanding friends, they asked me to inquire whether he would be willing to hold a lecture for the VB leadership, its local councillors and interested members, sympathizers and, in general, for anyone in Flanders interested in Roger Scruton. The VB wants to become more acquainted with conservative and libertarian thought. Last year they invited Hans-Hermann Hoppe, this year they were interested in hearing Roger.

So we’re all agreed. One year after the “no” votes, the leaders of the EU have decided to make the text binding by 2009. The new Italian government says it interprets the “no” votes as “a demand for more Europe, not less”. The Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt suggests changing the rules so that the European Constitution may be adopted by a qualified majority vote. The Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel says that ratification should be completed in 2007. Angela Merkel says the text is “vital to German interests”. The European Commission plans to push ahead with as much of the constitution as it can, with or without formal approval.