A quote from AKI, 16 May 2008

The Netherlands should abolish the overseas “integration test” that targets migrants of certain nationalities, according to an international rights group. Human Rights Watch said people of Moroccan and Turkish origin had been particularly hard hit by the test while citizens from western countries like Canada, Australia and Japan were exempt. […]

A quote from AKI, 16 May 2008

Spain’s vice-president Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega has accused the Italian government of racism and xenophobia. “The [Spanish] government rejects violence, racism and xenophobia, thus it does not agree with what is happening in Italy,” said Fernandez de la Vega at a media conference on Friday. [...]

A quote from the Oslo Police 2007 Rape Report, as quoted by Islam in Europe, 15 May 2008

[…]
A: But listen now, Norwegian girls complain that foreign boys do this and that, but the reason there are so many rapes is that Norwegian girls go around almost completely naked! That's like saying "come here and fuck me", you understand?

Q: You're saying that Norwegian girls are asking to be raped?

A quote from Macleans blogs [Canada], 12 May 2008

What is happening in Belgium is very serious. The subject at hand, language rights in the suburban area around Brussels, is touchy but for our purposes it is secondary to the parliamentary situation. For the first time in the country’s history, the Flemish parties – from the hard-right Vlaams Belang to the Greens – are voting in unison to impose the larger community’s will on the francophone Walloon parties, which as this authoritative blog from France’s Libération newspaper points out, are also voting as a languistic block. This kind of situation, in what amounts to an asymmetrical two-partner federation (there are smaller partner bits in Belgium, but basically it’s Flemish and French), is radically destabilizing. You need, and historically in Belgium have always had, coalitions that reach across language divides. Canada’s ability to produce such coalitions across French-English language divides, thanks often to Quebec’s ability to build coalitions of circumstance with one or several majority-English provinces, has been a key to our country’s survival and success. Once it breaks down into us-against-them, a two-partner federation faces immediate existential danger. The smaller partner will see it can never have its way on sensitive issues. Despite nearly a year’s hard work, Belgium is in something very close to that situation.

-Berlin, Germany. If you were asked to name one person who has enabled more people to gain wealth and security than any other person on the globe, who would you name?

In 1881, here in Berlin, Otto von Bismarck started the world's first modern pay-as-you-go social security system which served as the model for the U.S. Social Security system and that of many other countries, including setting the retirement age at 65. No, Bismarck is not the answer to the opening question, the answer is Jose Pinera, and here is why.

The Dutch authorities have arrested the cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot (a pseudonym. Nekschot means deathblow, litt: “shot in the back of the neck” [An interview with Nekschot here]). The judicial authorities in Amsterdam said yesterday that the cartoonist was arrested as a suspect for the criminal offense of “publishing cartoons which are discriminating for Muslims and people with dark skin.”

The cartoonist was arrested on Tuesday, while the police searched his house for “discriminating evidence.” His computer, backups, usb sticks, mobile phone and a number of drawings were confiscated. Nekschot was released two days later but it is possible that he will be charged following a complaint in 2005 by the Dutch imam Abdul Jabbar van de Ven, an indigenous Dutchman who converted to Islam.

A quote from Steven Erlanger in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, 13 May 2008

This combination of national pride, rightist politics, language purity and racially tinged opposition to big-city mores and immigration is a classic formula these days in modern Europe, a kind of nonviolent fascism.

A quote from Lawrence Auster at his blog, 15 May 2008

The key to the [Ontario Human Rights] Commission's thinking is in its labeling, as wrongful "Islamophobia," the view that Islam is a threat to the West. The assumption underlying such a judgment, whether about Islamophobia or bigotry generally, is that all people are good (except for people who don't believe that all people are good), and that no people can be a threat (except for those people who believe that some people can be a threat). Since all people (that is, all people who don't hate nothing except hatred) are good, and since no people are enemies (except for the people who believe that there are enemies), any negative statement about a group (except for negative statements about the society's own majority group) is by definition a false, vicious, dehumanizing attack on that group.

A quote from James Fulford at VDARE.com, 13 May 2008

There's a free speech trial going on in Finland, […] Here's what's happened: Mikko Ellilä is a blogger, who posted a rant on his blog about Africans and African immigration in Finland and elsewhere. (Excuse me for using the word rant – if you're a conservative you always hear that everything you've written is either a rant or a screed, but in this case it's more or less appropriate.)

An article written in December 2007 and published online in January 2008 has just attracted the attention of the spokesman for Islam, Integration and Extremism in the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The article is by the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mustafa Ceric, and two things are remarkable about it at first sight. The first is its title, “The challenge of a single Muslim authority in Europe” (more on this in a moment); the second is the place of publication.