The riots grew bigger. Schools and theaters were destroyed.... churches were burned to the ground; graffiti in red paint on a church in Marseilles declared: "Mohammed was the last prophet". Bank branches were ransacked and ATMs opened with chainsaws. Slogans were shouted: "death to the police", "death to France", "death to the Jews!"
The Dutch government collapsed on July 7 after failing to reach a deal on restricting immigration, which will trigger new elections in the fall. The crisis was triggered by a push by Prime Minister Mark Rutte's conservative VVD party to limit the flow of illegal immigrants to the Netherlands, which two of his four-party government coalition refused...
Leave it to a man-in-the-street Frenchman of Algerian origin, one of millions of people in France descended from Muslims who immigrated from the former colony that violently achieved independence, to lay out the stark reality of where this is headed, with no theological complications.
The tensions of major modern issues — the environment, immigration, trust in traditional institutions — have ripped up the political playbook. Right-wing parties such as Geert Wilders's PVV and new far-right party JA21, plus a potential new left-wing coalition of the Dutch Green Left and Labor are flexing their muscles for a general election. The...
All over Europe the right is surging ahead. Everywhere you look, the left is losing — in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary and now, following an election victory for the New Democracy party on Sunday, Greece. Cue the usual agonized and simplistic commentary about the march of the far right. But one common, if not quite ubiquitous,...
This is very bad news for anyone who believes in democracy and respects the most basic human rights. The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside of, "under its roof." Last week I lived under the roof of hope as the campaigns for the first round of the...
This is a watershed in the fight to defend our English girls from the pernicious evil of the 'Grooming Gangs' that infest almost every town and city across England. As the acting Solicitor in this case I acknowledge that this is a substantial victory but I am mindful of the 100,000 plus victims who have yet to see REAL justice....
There are moments in time that change the world. Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was one of those. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was another as was 9 November 1989, when the wall in Berlin, Germany, erected by the Soviets, was torn down. And you have witnessed another one today,...
The Kingdom is hardly a bastion of women's rights. Earlier this year, it was reported that FIFA was pursuing a sponsorship deal with the Saudi Arabian government's tourist promotion arm, Visit Saudi, to use the Women's World Cup as a vehicle to promote tourism to the fundamentalist Islamic kingdom. It is an arrangement that is "understood" to be...
Ever since the Palestinian people were invented in the late mid-to-late 1960s, they have been laying claim to an ancient lineage in "Palestine" - direct descent from the Jebusites and other Canaanite tribes that preceded the Jews in the land the Jews call Eretz Israel. It's nonsense, of course. The Palestinians are Arabs and Muslims, and Muslim...
