In the Netherlands the Left’s strategy of importing immigrants to turn them into voters in order to “elect a new people” is backfiring. After the November 2006 general elections the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) appointed two immigrant ministers to advertise its special concern for Muslim interests. Both ministers, Moroccan-born Admed Aboutaleb and Turkish-born Nebahat Albayrak, hold dual citizenship. Geert Wilders, the leader of the “Islamophobic” Freedom Party (PVV), opposed the appointment of the two ministers because they retained their original Moroccan and Turkish citizenship upon becoming Dutch citizens. Wilders says he doubts the loyalty to the Dutch nation of those who also want to remain loyal to other nations. The political establishment reacted with indignation, but the Dutch people seem to be vindicating Mr. Wilders.

Last Wednesday the Belgian King Albert II appointed the Flemish Christian-Democrat Herman Van Rompuy as his “scout” (explorateur). Mr Van Rompuy, a member of the Crown Council, has to defuse the political crisis ensuing from the inability of Belgium’s parties to put together a government after last June’s general elections. In Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of the country, where 60% of the Belgians live, these elections were won by parties that aim for greater Flemish autonomy and are no longer willing to subsidize Wallonia, the Socialist-dominated French-speaking south of the country.

Hugo Coveliers, the lawyer of the organizers of the pan-European anti-Islamization demonstration which is planned to take place in Brussels on 11 September, is taking his appeal against the ban of the demo by Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels, to another court. Earlier the organizers brought an appeal case before the Council of State (CoS), Belgium’s highest administrative court. Last Wednesday the CoS refused to overrule the ban, claiming that the organizers are unable to prove that their interests have been harmed by the refusal to demonstrate on 11 September.
 
Mr Coveliers has now decided to bring the case before a civil court. He is going to argue that the “subjective rights” of the organizers have been denied. If the court agrees with that argument there is a possibility that the organizers can claim damages from the Brussels mayor if he does not allow the demonstration to go ahead.

A quote from Dominic Lawson in The Independent, 31 August 2007

[T]he founder of Amnesty International was a Catholic convert, Peter Benenson. However, Mr Thomas Wiggins, of Wokingham, insisted that it is “completely wrong” to accuse Amnesty of “betraying the vision of its founders by supporting abortion”. Mr Wiggins argued that “Amnesty was not set up to protect the rights of the unborn, but to prevent human rights abuses.”

It is really getting quite untenable for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to continue pretending that the new European treaty is not the Constitution, hence no referendum is needed. Yesterday the Conference of Presidents, the organising body of the European Parliament, had its first meeting after the summer recess. And what was on the agenda?

A warning from the SIAD/SIOE website, 30 August 2007:

As expected a march like the 9/11 march has attracted organizations and people who intend to hijack our demonstration. [...] For example we can see that Paul Belien’s attempts to fragment the demonstration iby encouraging people to meet in a certain places in Brussels for a minute’s silence for the victims for 9/11 terrorist attack or even to celbrate his birthday.
 
SIOE alone decides the time, place and whatever is happening because our concern is, and always has been, the safety and security of demonstrators. [...] Paul Belien is not licensed organizer for SIOE and thus, whether he means to be or not, is a factor for splitting the stop-Islamisation wave that is building up now.
 
You cannot be against Islamisation and then use it for your own minor purposes. There is, but one goal - to stop the Islamisation of Europe.

In June 2002, the Arab-European League (AEL), an anti-Semitic Islamist organization of Belgian immigrants led by Lebanese-born Dyab Abu Jahjah, a notorious member of the Hezbollah, requested permission to hold a demonstration in Antwerp. Two months earlier, an AEL march had led to heavy riots in the city. Antwerp has Belgium’s largest concentration of Jews. The Antwerp mayor, fearing new violence, prohibited the demonstration.

The AEL appealed against the ban before the Council of State (CoS), Belgium’s highest administrative court. The CoS ruled that the mayor had violated the constitutional freedom to demonstrate and allowed the demonstration to go ahead. The demonstrators shouted pro-Hezbollah and pro-Hamas slogans, called George W. Bush a murderer, demanded a Belgian boycott of Israel and burned the effigy of a Hassidic Jew. The police kept a low profile and allowed the 600 demonstrators to do as they pleased. “Thanks to the independent Belgian judiciary we have been able to demonstrate,” a victorious AEL leader Dyab Abu Jahjah said, as the puppet representing the Jew burned behind him.

A quote from Bruce Thornton’s review of Diana West’s latest book, 24 August 2007

Much of the jihadist picture of the West is distorted, a caricature based on superficial observation and selective evidence. Yet there remain troubling aspects of American culture that give traction to the Islamic critique. In her book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times, pulls together the various dysfunctions and discontents of American civilization by seeing them as the expression of a unique historical development, the “death of the grown-up.” The demise of the adult has led to the abandonment of adult virtues and mentalities, and their replacement by the instant gratification, impatience with the limits of reality, and the obsession with the self typical of the teen-ager.

Today the Belgian Council of State (CoS) ruled to maintain the prohibition of an anti-Islamization demonstration on 11 September. Three weeks ago the demo was banned by Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels. Thielemans’s party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), caters for the many Muslim inhabitants of Brussels, the “capital of Europe.” Udo Ulfkotte, a German citizen and one of the organizers of the demo, who intended to bring 20,000 demonstrators to Brussels, decided to appeal against the mayor’s verdict before the Council of State, the highest administrative court in Belgium.
 
Yesterday, the Council of State postponed its ruling because it said it had to decide first whether the appeal could be made in Dutch or should be presented in French. Today, however, the CoS cut the case short and ruled outright to maintain the ban. According to the CoS Udo Ulfkotte cannot prove that his interests have been harmed by the mayor’s ban.

A quote from the VRT (Dutch-language Belgian public television), 28 August 2007

Udo Ulfkotte [the organizer of the banned anti-Islamization demo in Brussels next Sept. 11] (in German):

I do not understand why I have to defend myself. When one million people take to the streets in Turkey no-one says: These people are extremists who protest against the Islamization of Turkey. No-one would dream of saying a thing like that. But if the same thing happens here, in the heart of Europe, they say: These people are extremists. Can you explain this to me?