Very clever, Zit, except that the article in the OP was about "A 23-year-old Somali man and a 24-year-old German man born in Somalia ... German media identified the 24-year-old as Omar D. and the other man as Abdirazak B."
Houssein Al Malla and Eric Breininger are two completely other persons. The name salone should tell you that these are no Somalis.
"massive culture war"? Lots of problems, certainly (to a not insignificant extent provoked by the U.S. foreign policy), but "massive war" is ridiculous.
This is your opinion. I live in Germany and can tell you what you say is simply not true, at least if we both mean the same by "taking over".
This is not even a generalisation, it's just a wild assertion- fact.
You are more and more sounding like Joe C, and you certainly don't make any more sense than he did. I'm sorry, I didn't even bother to read that lengthy rant that you copied and pasted, complete with reader remarks, from a site called "Dhimmi Watch".
Islam shaping a new Europe
By Evan Osnos |Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
The results are stark. Within six years, for instance, the three largest cities in the Netherlands will be majority Muslim. One-third of all German Muslims are younger than 18, nearly twice the proportion of the general population.
With that growth, and the deepening strains between the U.S. and the Islamic world, radical Muslim clerics have found no shortage of adherents. A 2002 poll of British Muslims found that 44 percent believe attacks by Al Qaeda are justified as long as "Muslims are being killed by America and its allies using American weapons." Germany estimates that there are 31,000 Islamists in the country, based on membership lists of conservative federations.
Year by year, European Islam pulls further away from the cultural traditions of Morocco or Algeria, refashioned all the while by the pressures of life in Europe. For some, the solution is a more liberalized Islam that incorporates Western concepts of individual rights and tolerance. But for others, the answer lies in a stricter interpretation of the core elements of the faith.
"It is more fundamentalist in its essence because what you subsist on is personal practice--reading of the Koran, Shariah," Vaisse said. "It can take very humanist forms, but in some cases, it can also lead to political radicalization and terrorism."
The potentially serious effects of that radicalization became clear on March 11, when coordinated bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800. Moroccan and Tunisian suspects later killed themselves in a standoff with police.
More recently, the Netherlands is in turmoil after the brutal killing of Theo van Gogh, who made a controversial film about violence against women in Islamic societies. Police arrested a 26-year-old man with Dutch-Moroccan citizenship and charged him with stabbing and shooting van Gogh. The suspect allegedly pinned a note to the body with a knife.
Within days, an Islamic school was set ablaze, and retribution followed. Right-wing politicians in Belgium and Germany demanded new curbs on immigration. In time, however, a more ominous fact emerged from the case: It was not the work of newly arrived immigrants with extremist views, but the product of homegrown radicalism. Police say suspect Mohammed Bouyeri wrote the death note in Dutch, not Arabic.
"This [cultural] schizophrenia is the most dangerous thing we face in Europe today," said Gilles Kepel, head of Middle East studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and author of several books on Islam in Europe. "It means Madrid. It means Mohamed Atta," he said, referring to one of the Sept. 11 hijackers who lived for some time in Germany.
By Evan Osnos |Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
The results are stark. Within six years, for instance, the three largest cities in the Netherlands will be majority Muslim. One-third of all German Muslims are younger than 18, nearly twice the proportion of the general population.
With that growth, and the deepening strains between the U.S. and the Islamic world, radical Muslim clerics have found no shortage of adherents. A 2002 poll of British Muslims found that 44 percent believe attacks by Al Qaeda are justified as long as "Muslims are being killed by America and its allies using American weapons." Germany estimates that there are 31,000 Islamists in the country, based on membership lists of conservative federations.
Year by year, European Islam pulls further away from the cultural traditions of Morocco or Algeria, refashioned all the while by the pressures of life in Europe. For some, the solution is a more liberalized Islam that incorporates Western concepts of individual rights and tolerance. But for others, the answer lies in a stricter interpretation of the core elements of the faith.
"It is more fundamentalist in its essence because what you subsist on is personal practice--reading of the Koran, Shariah," Vaisse said. "It can take very humanist forms, but in some cases, it can also lead to political radicalization and terrorism."
The potentially serious effects of that radicalization became clear on March 11, when coordinated bombings of four commuter trains in Madrid killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,800. Moroccan and Tunisian suspects later killed themselves in a standoff with police.
More recently, the Netherlands is in turmoil after the brutal killing of Theo van Gogh, who made a controversial film about violence against women in Islamic societies. Police arrested a 26-year-old man with Dutch-Moroccan citizenship and charged him with stabbing and shooting van Gogh. The suspect allegedly pinned a note to the body with a knife.
Within days, an Islamic school was set ablaze, and retribution followed. Right-wing politicians in Belgium and Germany demanded new curbs on immigration. In time, however, a more ominous fact emerged from the case: It was not the work of newly arrived immigrants with extremist views, but the product of homegrown radicalism. Police say suspect Mohammed Bouyeri wrote the death note in Dutch, not Arabic.
"This [cultural] schizophrenia is the most dangerous thing we face in Europe today," said Gilles Kepel, head of Middle East studies at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and author of several books on Islam in Europe. "It means Madrid. It means Mohamed Atta," he said, referring to one of the Sept. 11 hijackers who lived for some time in Germany.
Europe's Angry Muslims
Robert S. Leiken
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005
<!--begin purchase message--> <!--end purchase message--> <!-- begin divider with "purchase", "print", and "email" buttons --> <hr class="hidden"> <hr class="hidden">
<!-- end divider with "purchase", "print", and "email" buttons --> <!-- begin summary --> Summary: Radical Islam is spreading across Europe among descendants of Muslim immigrants. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the failure of integration, some European Muslims have taken up jihad against the West. They are dangerous and committed -- and can enter the United States without a visa.
<!-- end summary --> Robert S. Leiken is Director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and a nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Bearers of Jihad? Immigration and National Security After 9/11.
<!-- begin "Of Related Interest" box --> <hr class="hidden"> Of Related Interest
<!-- end "Of Related Interest" box --> <!-- begin 500-word preview --> AN AMERICAN CONCERN
Fox News and CNN's Lou Dobbs worry about terrorists stealing across the United States' border with Mexico concealed among illegal immigrants. The Pentagon wages war in the Middle East to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. But the growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies.
Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals -- eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.
The emergence of homegrown mujahideen in Europe threatens the United States as well as Europe. Yet it was the dog that never barked at last winter's Euro-American rapprochement meeting. Neither President George W. Bush nor Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew attention to this mutual peril, even though it should focus minds and could buttress solidarity in the West.
YOUR LAND IS MY LAND
The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs. Backed by friendly politicians and sympathetic judges, foreign workers, who were supposed to stay temporarily, benefited from family reunification programs and became permanent. Successive waves of immigrants formed a sea of descendants. Today, Muslims constitute the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom. Exact numbers are hard to come by because Western censuses rarely ask respondents about their faith. But it is estimated that between 15 and 20 million Muslims now call Europe home and make up four to five percent of its total population. (Muslims in the United States probably do not exceed 3 million, accounting for less than two percent of the total population.) France has the largest proportion of Muslims (seven to ten percent of its total population), followed by the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Given continued immigration and high Muslim fertility rates, the National Intelligence Council projects that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who entered a gigantic country built on immigration, most Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations. Their influx was a new phenomenon for many host states and often unwelcome. Meanwhile, North African immigrants retained powerful attachments to their native cultures. So unlike American Muslims, who are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, Europe's Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
The footprint of Muslim immigrants in Europe is already more visible than that of the Hispanic population in the United States. Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam": militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.
As the French academic Gilles Kepel acknowledges, "neither the blood spilled by Muslims from North Africa fighting in French uniforms during both world wars nor the sweat of migrant laborers, living under deplorable living conditions, who rebuilt France (and Europe) for a pittance after 1945, has made their children ... full fellow citizens." Small wonder, then, that a radical leader of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, a group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, curses his new homeland: "Oh sweet France! Are you astonished that so many of your children commune in a stinging naal bou la France [fuck France], and damn your Fathers?"
As a consequence of demography, history, ideology, and policy, western Europe now plays host to often disconsolate Muslim offspring, who are its citizens in name but not culturally or socially. In a fit of absentmindedness, during which its academics discoursed on the obsolescence of the nation-state, western Europe acquired not a colonial empire but something of an internal colony, whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of Syria. Many of its members are willing to integrate and try to climb Europe's steep social ladder. But many younger Muslims reject the minority status to which their parents acquiesced. A volatile mix of European nativism and immigrant dissidence challenges what the Danish sociologist Ole Waever calls "societal security," or national cohesion. To make matters worse, the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen to fundraise, prepare, and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries.
As these conditions developed in the late 1990s, even liberal segments of the European public began to have second thoughts about immigration. Many were galled by their governments' failure to reduce or even identify the sources of insécurité (a French code word for the combination of vandalism, delinquency, and hate crimes stemming from Muslim immigrant enclaves). The state appeared unable to regulate the entry of immigrants, and society seemed unwilling to integrate them. In some cases, the backlash was xenophobic and racist; in others, it was a reaction against policymakers captivated by a multiculturalist dream of diverse communities living in harmony, offering oppressed nationalities marked compassion and remedial benefits. By 2002, electoral rebellion over the issue of immigration was threatening the party systems of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. The Dutch were so incensed by the 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a gay anti-immigration politician, that mainstream parties adopted much of the victim's program. In the United Kingdom this spring, the Tories not only joined the ruling Labour Party in embracing sweeping immigration restrictions, such as tightened procedures for asylum and family reunification (both regularly abused throughout Europe) and a computerized exit-entry system like the new U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology program; they also campaigned for numerical caps on immigrants. With the Muslim headscarf controversy raging in France, talk about the connection between asylum abuse and terrorism rising in the United Kingdom, an immigration dispute threatening to tear Belgium apart, and the Dutch outrage over the van Gogh killing, western Europe may now be reaching a tipping point.
GOING DUTCH
The uncomfortable truth is that disenfranchisement and radicalization are happening even in countries, such as the Netherlands, that have done much to accommodate Muslim immigrants. Proud of a legendary tolerance of minorities, the Netherlands welcomed tens of thousands of Muslim asylum seekers allegedly escaping persecution. Immigrants availed themselves of generous welfare and housing benefits, an affirmative-action hiring policy, and free language courses. Dutch taxpayers funded Muslim religious schools and mosques, and public television broadcast programs in Moroccan Arabic. Mohammed Bouyeri was collecting unemployment benefits when he murdered van Gogh.
The van Gogh slaying rocked the Netherlands and neighboring countries not only because the victim, a provocative filmmaker, was a descendant of the painter Vincent, the Dutch's most cherished icon, but also because Bouyeri was "an average second-generation immigrant," according to Stef Blok, the chairman of the parliamentary commission reviewing Bouyeri's immigration record. European counterterrorism authorities saw the killing as a new phase in the terrorist threat. It raised the specter of Middle East-style political assassinations as part of the European jihadist arsenal and it disclosed a new source of danger: unknown individuals among Europe's own Muslims. The cell in Hamburg that was connected to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was composed of student visitors, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 were committed by Moroccan immigrants. But van Gogh's killer and his associates were born and raised in Europe.
Bouyeri was the child of Moroccan immigrant workers. He grew up in a proletarian area of Amsterdam sometimes known as Satellite City because of the many reception dishes that sit on its balconies, tuned to al Jazeera and Moroccan television. Bouyeri's parents arrived in a wave of immigration in the 1970s and never learned Dutch. But Bouyeri graduated from the area's best high school. His transformation from promising student to jihadist follows a pattern in which groups of thriving, young European Muslims enlist in jihad to slaughter Westerners.
After graduating from a local college and then taking advanced courses in accounting and information technology, Bouyeri, who had an unruly temper, was jailed for seven months on a violence-related crime. He emerged from jail an Islamist, angry over Palestine and sympathetic to Hamas. He studied social work and became a community organizer. He wrote in a community newsletter that "the Netherlands is now our enemy because they participate in the occupation of Iraq." After he failed to get funding for a youth center in Satellite City and was unable to ban the sale of beer or the presence of women at the events he organized, he moved to downtown Amsterdam. There, he was recruited into the Hofstad Group, a cell of second-generation Islamic militants.
The cell started meeting every two weeks in Bouyeri's apartment to hear the sermons of a Syrian preacher known as Abu Khatib. Hofstad was connected to networks in Spain, Morocco, Italy, and Belgium, and it was planning a string of assassinations of Dutch politicians, an attack on the Netherlands' sole nuclear reactor, and other actions around Europe. European intelligence services have linked the cell to the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which is associated with the Madrid bombings and a series of attacks in Casablanca in 2003. Its Syrian imam was involved with mujahideen in Iraq and with an operational chief of al Qaeda. "Judging by Bouyeri's and the Hofstad network's international contacts," an analyst for the Norwegian government says, "it seems safe to conclude that they were part of the numerous terrorist plots that have been unraveled over the past years in western Europe."
The Hofstad Group should not be compared with marginal European terrorist groups of the past, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Action Directe in France, or the Red Brigades in Italy. Like other jihadist groups today, it enjoys what Marxist terrorists long sought but always lacked: a social base. And its base is growing rapidly, thanks in part to the war in Iraq.
Continued here:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84409/robert-s-leiken/europe-s-angry-muslims.html
Robert S. Leiken
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005
<!--begin purchase message--> <!--end purchase message--> <!-- begin divider with "purchase", "print", and "email" buttons --> <hr class="hidden"> <hr class="hidden">
<!-- end divider with "purchase", "print", and "email" buttons --> <!-- begin summary --> Summary: Radical Islam is spreading across Europe among descendants of Muslim immigrants. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the failure of integration, some European Muslims have taken up jihad against the West. They are dangerous and committed -- and can enter the United States without a visa.
<!-- end summary --> Robert S. Leiken is Director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and a nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Bearers of Jihad? Immigration and National Security After 9/11.
<!-- begin "Of Related Interest" box --> <hr class="hidden"> Of Related Interest
- Topics:
Europe
Terrorism
Social and Cultural Issues - Europe's Divided Muslims
By Liat Radcliffe Ross
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006
<!-- end "Of Related Interest" box --> <!-- begin 500-word preview --> AN AMERICAN CONCERN
Fox News and CNN's Lou Dobbs worry about terrorists stealing across the United States' border with Mexico concealed among illegal immigrants. The Pentagon wages war in the Middle East to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. But the growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies.
Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals -- eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.
The emergence of homegrown mujahideen in Europe threatens the United States as well as Europe. Yet it was the dog that never barked at last winter's Euro-American rapprochement meeting. Neither President George W. Bush nor Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew attention to this mutual peril, even though it should focus minds and could buttress solidarity in the West.
YOUR LAND IS MY LAND
The mass immigration of Muslims to Europe was an unintended consequence of post-World War II guest-worker programs. Backed by friendly politicians and sympathetic judges, foreign workers, who were supposed to stay temporarily, benefited from family reunification programs and became permanent. Successive waves of immigrants formed a sea of descendants. Today, Muslims constitute the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom. Exact numbers are hard to come by because Western censuses rarely ask respondents about their faith. But it is estimated that between 15 and 20 million Muslims now call Europe home and make up four to five percent of its total population. (Muslims in the United States probably do not exceed 3 million, accounting for less than two percent of the total population.) France has the largest proportion of Muslims (seven to ten percent of its total population), followed by the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Given continued immigration and high Muslim fertility rates, the National Intelligence Council projects that Europe's Muslim population will double by 2025.
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, who entered a gigantic country built on immigration, most Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations. Their influx was a new phenomenon for many host states and often unwelcome. Meanwhile, North African immigrants retained powerful attachments to their native cultures. So unlike American Muslims, who are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, Europe's Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
The footprint of Muslim immigrants in Europe is already more visible than that of the Hispanic population in the United States. Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls "globalized Islam": militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.
As the French academic Gilles Kepel acknowledges, "neither the blood spilled by Muslims from North Africa fighting in French uniforms during both world wars nor the sweat of migrant laborers, living under deplorable living conditions, who rebuilt France (and Europe) for a pittance after 1945, has made their children ... full fellow citizens." Small wonder, then, that a radical leader of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, a group associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, curses his new homeland: "Oh sweet France! Are you astonished that so many of your children commune in a stinging naal bou la France [fuck France], and damn your Fathers?"
As a consequence of demography, history, ideology, and policy, western Europe now plays host to often disconsolate Muslim offspring, who are its citizens in name but not culturally or socially. In a fit of absentmindedness, during which its academics discoursed on the obsolescence of the nation-state, western Europe acquired not a colonial empire but something of an internal colony, whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of Syria. Many of its members are willing to integrate and try to climb Europe's steep social ladder. But many younger Muslims reject the minority status to which their parents acquiesced. A volatile mix of European nativism and immigrant dissidence challenges what the Danish sociologist Ole Waever calls "societal security," or national cohesion. To make matters worse, the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen to fundraise, prepare, and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries.
As these conditions developed in the late 1990s, even liberal segments of the European public began to have second thoughts about immigration. Many were galled by their governments' failure to reduce or even identify the sources of insécurité (a French code word for the combination of vandalism, delinquency, and hate crimes stemming from Muslim immigrant enclaves). The state appeared unable to regulate the entry of immigrants, and society seemed unwilling to integrate them. In some cases, the backlash was xenophobic and racist; in others, it was a reaction against policymakers captivated by a multiculturalist dream of diverse communities living in harmony, offering oppressed nationalities marked compassion and remedial benefits. By 2002, electoral rebellion over the issue of immigration was threatening the party systems of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. The Dutch were so incensed by the 2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a gay anti-immigration politician, that mainstream parties adopted much of the victim's program. In the United Kingdom this spring, the Tories not only joined the ruling Labour Party in embracing sweeping immigration restrictions, such as tightened procedures for asylum and family reunification (both regularly abused throughout Europe) and a computerized exit-entry system like the new U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology program; they also campaigned for numerical caps on immigrants. With the Muslim headscarf controversy raging in France, talk about the connection between asylum abuse and terrorism rising in the United Kingdom, an immigration dispute threatening to tear Belgium apart, and the Dutch outrage over the van Gogh killing, western Europe may now be reaching a tipping point.
GOING DUTCH
The uncomfortable truth is that disenfranchisement and radicalization are happening even in countries, such as the Netherlands, that have done much to accommodate Muslim immigrants. Proud of a legendary tolerance of minorities, the Netherlands welcomed tens of thousands of Muslim asylum seekers allegedly escaping persecution. Immigrants availed themselves of generous welfare and housing benefits, an affirmative-action hiring policy, and free language courses. Dutch taxpayers funded Muslim religious schools and mosques, and public television broadcast programs in Moroccan Arabic. Mohammed Bouyeri was collecting unemployment benefits when he murdered van Gogh.
The van Gogh slaying rocked the Netherlands and neighboring countries not only because the victim, a provocative filmmaker, was a descendant of the painter Vincent, the Dutch's most cherished icon, but also because Bouyeri was "an average second-generation immigrant," according to Stef Blok, the chairman of the parliamentary commission reviewing Bouyeri's immigration record. European counterterrorism authorities saw the killing as a new phase in the terrorist threat. It raised the specter of Middle East-style political assassinations as part of the European jihadist arsenal and it disclosed a new source of danger: unknown individuals among Europe's own Muslims. The cell in Hamburg that was connected to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was composed of student visitors, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 were committed by Moroccan immigrants. But van Gogh's killer and his associates were born and raised in Europe.
Bouyeri was the child of Moroccan immigrant workers. He grew up in a proletarian area of Amsterdam sometimes known as Satellite City because of the many reception dishes that sit on its balconies, tuned to al Jazeera and Moroccan television. Bouyeri's parents arrived in a wave of immigration in the 1970s and never learned Dutch. But Bouyeri graduated from the area's best high school. His transformation from promising student to jihadist follows a pattern in which groups of thriving, young European Muslims enlist in jihad to slaughter Westerners.
After graduating from a local college and then taking advanced courses in accounting and information technology, Bouyeri, who had an unruly temper, was jailed for seven months on a violence-related crime. He emerged from jail an Islamist, angry over Palestine and sympathetic to Hamas. He studied social work and became a community organizer. He wrote in a community newsletter that "the Netherlands is now our enemy because they participate in the occupation of Iraq." After he failed to get funding for a youth center in Satellite City and was unable to ban the sale of beer or the presence of women at the events he organized, he moved to downtown Amsterdam. There, he was recruited into the Hofstad Group, a cell of second-generation Islamic militants.
The cell started meeting every two weeks in Bouyeri's apartment to hear the sermons of a Syrian preacher known as Abu Khatib. Hofstad was connected to networks in Spain, Morocco, Italy, and Belgium, and it was planning a string of assassinations of Dutch politicians, an attack on the Netherlands' sole nuclear reactor, and other actions around Europe. European intelligence services have linked the cell to the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which is associated with the Madrid bombings and a series of attacks in Casablanca in 2003. Its Syrian imam was involved with mujahideen in Iraq and with an operational chief of al Qaeda. "Judging by Bouyeri's and the Hofstad network's international contacts," an analyst for the Norwegian government says, "it seems safe to conclude that they were part of the numerous terrorist plots that have been unraveled over the past years in western Europe."
The Hofstad Group should not be compared with marginal European terrorist groups of the past, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, Action Directe in France, or the Red Brigades in Italy. Like other jihadist groups today, it enjoys what Marxist terrorists long sought but always lacked: a social base. And its base is growing rapidly, thanks in part to the war in Iraq.
Continued here:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050701faessay84409/robert-s-leiken/europe-s-angry-muslims.html
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Hardcover)
Having recently published an indictment of Christian fundamentalist intolerance in the U.S. (Stealing Jesus), New York native Bawer relocated to Europe with his Norwegian partner in 1998 and found an even more dangerous strain of religious and cultural bigotry ensnaring Western Europe. A swarming menace called radical Islam, he writes, rings Europe's cities in smoldering Muslim ghettos, provoking everything from so-called honor killings and political assassinations to the Madrid subway bombings and the massacre of school children in Beslan. Worse, the Taliban-like theocracy Bawer sees looming inside backward immigrant populations resistant to integration flourishes under the protective wing of Western Europe's America-bashing, multicultural, liberal establishment. The latter correspond to the appeasers of Nazi Germany, in Bawer's view, since he believes that radical Islamism is every bit the threat to Western civilization that Nazism was. He scoffs at talk of "understanding" or "dialogue," indeed, at any but the most muscular response hitching Europe ever tighter to the U.S. war on terror. His clash-of-civilizations outlook means real issues often get washed away by sweeping statements designed to tar Europe's Muslims with one irredeemably hostile, welfare-sponging brush, while trading in well-worn stereotypes about virtuous American "realists" and corrupt European "idealists."
Looks like I'm not the only one comparing the rise of Islamo-fasicsm in the west to Nazism.
:nohead::nohead::nohead:
http://www.amazon.com/While-Europe-Slept-Radical-Destroying/dp/0385514727
"I honestly think that every American should read it. It is a clarion call to not repeat the myopic, multicultural mistakes that have gotten European countries into a fix that I honestly don't see how they can get out of now. You will acquire a clear portrait of the attitudes of Muslims in Europe, as well as those of elitist Europeans in all of their moral smugness and self-assuming superiority. Many themes are presented, but perhaps the over-arching theme is that tolerance for the intolerable (wife beating, genital mutilation, honor killing, rape, etc.) is never ever a good policy for a freedom loving, individual-respecting society."
"As a European I can tell you, Bawer has some strong and convincing arguments about the European crisis. Let the European crisis be a warning for what are the results of a political correct society that promotes cultural relativism. Be warned and read this well written book, it's a quick read."
Having recently published an indictment of Christian fundamentalist intolerance in the U.S. (Stealing Jesus), New York native Bawer relocated to Europe with his Norwegian partner in 1998 and found an even more dangerous strain of religious and cultural bigotry ensnaring Western Europe. A swarming menace called radical Islam, he writes, rings Europe's cities in smoldering Muslim ghettos, provoking everything from so-called honor killings and political assassinations to the Madrid subway bombings and the massacre of school children in Beslan. Worse, the Taliban-like theocracy Bawer sees looming inside backward immigrant populations resistant to integration flourishes under the protective wing of Western Europe's America-bashing, multicultural, liberal establishment. The latter correspond to the appeasers of Nazi Germany, in Bawer's view, since he believes that radical Islamism is every bit the threat to Western civilization that Nazism was. He scoffs at talk of "understanding" or "dialogue," indeed, at any but the most muscular response hitching Europe ever tighter to the U.S. war on terror. His clash-of-civilizations outlook means real issues often get washed away by sweeping statements designed to tar Europe's Muslims with one irredeemably hostile, welfare-sponging brush, while trading in well-worn stereotypes about virtuous American "realists" and corrupt European "idealists."
Looks like I'm not the only one comparing the rise of Islamo-fasicsm in the west to Nazism.
:nohead::nohead::nohead:
http://www.amazon.com/While-Europe-Slept-Radical-Destroying/dp/0385514727
"I honestly think that every American should read it. It is a clarion call to not repeat the myopic, multicultural mistakes that have gotten European countries into a fix that I honestly don't see how they can get out of now. You will acquire a clear portrait of the attitudes of Muslims in Europe, as well as those of elitist Europeans in all of their moral smugness and self-assuming superiority. Many themes are presented, but perhaps the over-arching theme is that tolerance for the intolerable (wife beating, genital mutilation, honor killing, rape, etc.) is never ever a good policy for a freedom loving, individual-respecting society."
"As a European I can tell you, Bawer has some strong and convincing arguments about the European crisis. Let the European crisis be a warning for what are the results of a political correct society that promotes cultural relativism. Be warned and read this well written book, it's a quick read."
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis <noscript>
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Bat Ye'or is the world's preeminent historian of Islam, jihad and dhimmitude--the reduced state of non-Muslim peoples living under Islamic rule. Here, she has masterfully portrayed the means by which the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) unfolded over the past 30-plus years, and how that process relates to the World War II Axis--as well as the historical, 1,400-year jihad.
"There are three forms of jihad," says Bat Ye'or today, "the military jihad, the economic jihad and the cultural jihad." The EAD between the European Union and the Arab League has been a means of spreading the economic and cultural jihads from the Middle East to Europe.
The process outlined here began with Charles DeGualle's 1967 pronouncement that henceforward, France would assume a pro-Arab policy. In 1971, France began selling arms to Qaddafi, a step from which the EAD flowed as naturally as it did from DeGualle's policy initiative.
Another factor, according to Bat Ye'or, was the French desire to regain a leading role in European history; Georges Pompidou furthered the process in October 1973, following the Syrian and Egyptian Yom Kippur war with Israel.
At that time, the Arab world imposed an oil embargo on Denmark, Holland and the U.S., cut oil production and began to raise oil prices by five percent a month. These new global geopolitics terrified the leaders of Germany and France.
Before it agreed to establish the EAD, the Arab League had demanded that Europe establish pro-Arab and anti-American policies in all their united political, cultural and economic endeavors. The oil embargo was the catalyst which finally moved the European Economic Community to action. Now, writes Bat Ye'or, EEC ministers enacted resolutions that met the Arab demands, and which at the same time reversed the true intent of United Nations Resolution 242. Only then was the Arab oil embargo to Europe lifted.
Through this give and take, Europe was mostly on the losing end, for the EAD contained from the start a significant rider to its economic agreements concerning oil. Now, a process unfolded whereby Arab culture, politics and faith were imported into Europe along with a militant Muslim population that refused to assimilate into European culture. Arab culture did not change, while European universities and politics changed radically.
Bat Ye'or also shows how the EAD renewed and fostered Europe's Axis ties to the Middle East: In the late 1940s and 1950s war criminals fled Europe to Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations. Now, Axis links to Europe were rekindled through the Middle Eastern policies imported into Europe. The new Europe was built on a unified anti-Israel and anti-American policy.
As Bat Ye'or also suggests, America is the last frontier, and the American people should take it as their duty to avoid Europe's fate.
"Eurabia's destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States...Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people. Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia's contemporary anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent."
Living in Germany and knowing many European countries well, I must say it is a fact that, during the next 30 years, we will see a muslim majority in Europe, no doubt at all. Today, the majority of all children born in the entire Netherlands as well as in most cities of Germany, France, England and so on are muslim.
You do the maths. The majority of these is neither willing nor able to adopt to what we would consider a European, or western, way of life. So much for the facts.
Still, I do not agree with the author when it comes to the reasons for the developments that got Europe that far.
European governments apart from the French one have never been supporting Arab plans for expansion, they simply let it happen.
They let it happen because whenever you dare to speak out on immigration issues as a European, you're considered a fascist.
Probably that's something Americans cannot understand, but Europe after WWII has never recovered anything called pride, values, protection of its own people first....
Yes, it's a shame we let it happen.
Before you blame us the next time for not acting before it was too late, will you please take a look at California?
Anyway, I hope you read the signs and learn from our coming downfall before it may be too late for you folks as well!
Mark Steyn says it best: "Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries." - January 2006 THE NEW CRITERION
So, this is how 1,500 years of western civilization comes to an end? And what of the millions of decent, upstanding, cultured peoples of Europe who gave their lives for the survival of their nations; the millions who were bombed and burned to death, torn to shreds by shrapnel; the soldiers at Flanders, the Somme, Verdun who choked to death on poison gas; the women, elderly, and children who were incinerated in Hamburg and Dresden; and the untold millions of broken European bodies that froze and starved to death in Russia, Poland, Germany.... And these now dead European souls have been replaced by the dirty, bearded swarms of Islamist vermin that now drift around the cities of Europe.
This is how it is to end?
The Europeans today are not worthy of the greatness and courage of their ancestors, who would NEVER have allowed this calumnity to happen. This treason, this perversion of nature and biology, came about because the so-called postmodern Eurocrats turned their backs on their history and culture.
So, the high art of the Renaissance and the sublime philisophy of the Enlightenment will one day be replaced by the cultural-wasteland of Arabia and the Dark Ages-era thinking of the Koran? The untold millions of culture-bearing souls died to eventually have their inheritance handed over to a Martian-like foreign species? And the genius of a Bach, a Beethoven, a Shakespeare, a Rousseau, a Rembrandt, etc.... will be replaced by the illiterate, child-raping fraud Mohammed? And the courageous leadership of a Churchill, a Bismarck, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, etc..... will be supplanted by the cave-dwelling coward Osama?
This is all the result of the perverted sickness that now afflicts the so-called postmodern world: liberal multi-culturalism, the murderer of our civilization.
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Bat Ye'or is the world's preeminent historian of Islam, jihad and dhimmitude--the reduced state of non-Muslim peoples living under Islamic rule. Here, she has masterfully portrayed the means by which the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) unfolded over the past 30-plus years, and how that process relates to the World War II Axis--as well as the historical, 1,400-year jihad.
"There are three forms of jihad," says Bat Ye'or today, "the military jihad, the economic jihad and the cultural jihad." The EAD between the European Union and the Arab League has been a means of spreading the economic and cultural jihads from the Middle East to Europe.
The process outlined here began with Charles DeGualle's 1967 pronouncement that henceforward, France would assume a pro-Arab policy. In 1971, France began selling arms to Qaddafi, a step from which the EAD flowed as naturally as it did from DeGualle's policy initiative.
Another factor, according to Bat Ye'or, was the French desire to regain a leading role in European history; Georges Pompidou furthered the process in October 1973, following the Syrian and Egyptian Yom Kippur war with Israel.
At that time, the Arab world imposed an oil embargo on Denmark, Holland and the U.S., cut oil production and began to raise oil prices by five percent a month. These new global geopolitics terrified the leaders of Germany and France.
Before it agreed to establish the EAD, the Arab League had demanded that Europe establish pro-Arab and anti-American policies in all their united political, cultural and economic endeavors. The oil embargo was the catalyst which finally moved the European Economic Community to action. Now, writes Bat Ye'or, EEC ministers enacted resolutions that met the Arab demands, and which at the same time reversed the true intent of United Nations Resolution 242. Only then was the Arab oil embargo to Europe lifted.
Through this give and take, Europe was mostly on the losing end, for the EAD contained from the start a significant rider to its economic agreements concerning oil. Now, a process unfolded whereby Arab culture, politics and faith were imported into Europe along with a militant Muslim population that refused to assimilate into European culture. Arab culture did not change, while European universities and politics changed radically.
Bat Ye'or also shows how the EAD renewed and fostered Europe's Axis ties to the Middle East: In the late 1940s and 1950s war criminals fled Europe to Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations. Now, Axis links to Europe were rekindled through the Middle Eastern policies imported into Europe. The new Europe was built on a unified anti-Israel and anti-American policy.
As Bat Ye'or also suggests, America is the last frontier, and the American people should take it as their duty to avoid Europe's fate.
"Eurabia's destiny was sealed when it decided, willingly, to become a covert partner with the Arab global jihad against America and Israel. Americans must discuss the tragic development of Eurabia, and its profound implications for the United States...Americans should consider the despair and confusion of many Europeans, prisoners of a Eurabian totalitarianism that foments a culture of deadly lies about Western civilization. Americans should know that this self-destructive calamity did not just happen, rather it was the result of deliberate policies, executed and monitored by ostensibly responsible people. Finally, Americans should understand that Eurabia's contemporary anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism are the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent."
Living in Germany and knowing many European countries well, I must say it is a fact that, during the next 30 years, we will see a muslim majority in Europe, no doubt at all. Today, the majority of all children born in the entire Netherlands as well as in most cities of Germany, France, England and so on are muslim.
You do the maths. The majority of these is neither willing nor able to adopt to what we would consider a European, or western, way of life. So much for the facts.
Still, I do not agree with the author when it comes to the reasons for the developments that got Europe that far.
European governments apart from the French one have never been supporting Arab plans for expansion, they simply let it happen.
They let it happen because whenever you dare to speak out on immigration issues as a European, you're considered a fascist.
Probably that's something Americans cannot understand, but Europe after WWII has never recovered anything called pride, values, protection of its own people first....
Yes, it's a shame we let it happen.
Before you blame us the next time for not acting before it was too late, will you please take a look at California?
Anyway, I hope you read the signs and learn from our coming downfall before it may be too late for you folks as well!
Mark Steyn says it best: "Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries." - January 2006 THE NEW CRITERION
So, this is how 1,500 years of western civilization comes to an end? And what of the millions of decent, upstanding, cultured peoples of Europe who gave their lives for the survival of their nations; the millions who were bombed and burned to death, torn to shreds by shrapnel; the soldiers at Flanders, the Somme, Verdun who choked to death on poison gas; the women, elderly, and children who were incinerated in Hamburg and Dresden; and the untold millions of broken European bodies that froze and starved to death in Russia, Poland, Germany.... And these now dead European souls have been replaced by the dirty, bearded swarms of Islamist vermin that now drift around the cities of Europe.
This is how it is to end?
The Europeans today are not worthy of the greatness and courage of their ancestors, who would NEVER have allowed this calumnity to happen. This treason, this perversion of nature and biology, came about because the so-called postmodern Eurocrats turned their backs on their history and culture.
So, the high art of the Renaissance and the sublime philisophy of the Enlightenment will one day be replaced by the cultural-wasteland of Arabia and the Dark Ages-era thinking of the Koran? The untold millions of culture-bearing souls died to eventually have their inheritance handed over to a Martian-like foreign species? And the genius of a Bach, a Beethoven, a Shakespeare, a Rousseau, a Rembrandt, etc.... will be replaced by the illiterate, child-raping fraud Mohammed? And the courageous leadership of a Churchill, a Bismarck, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, etc..... will be supplanted by the cave-dwelling coward Osama?
This is all the result of the perverted sickness that now afflicts the so-called postmodern world: liberal multi-culturalism, the murderer of our civilization.
Look at the riots in France from a couple of years ago. Look at the entire communities in the Netherlands of Muslims.
You have a normal Dutch neighborhood next to a Muslim neighborhood that if you didn't know where you were, you might think you were in Jordan or Saudi Arabia. The immigrants don't speak the naitive language ( that makes it pretty hard to work), and the naitives end up paying higher welfare and entitlement costs because of it.
It isn't a melting pot, but a salad with side by side communities.
I lived in Germany over 10 years ago, and there were already a lot of muslims and the Germans couldn't stand them. They would work jobs like street sweeper ( that didn't require the german language).
Within 50 years Europe will certainly be a Muslim continent. People project it to much earlier, but I'd expect the locals to rise up and fight it which would slow down the process.
You have a normal Dutch neighborhood next to a Muslim neighborhood that if you didn't know where you were, you might think you were in Jordan or Saudi Arabia. The immigrants don't speak the naitive language ( that makes it pretty hard to work), and the naitives end up paying higher welfare and entitlement costs because of it.
It isn't a melting pot, but a salad with side by side communities.
I lived in Germany over 10 years ago, and there were already a lot of muslims and the Germans couldn't stand them. They would work jobs like street sweeper ( that didn't require the german language).
Within 50 years Europe will certainly be a Muslim continent. People project it to much earlier, but I'd expect the locals to rise up and fight it which would slow down the process.
Oh yes? Which?
Just because Bawer and Wilders, two men with the same right-wing ideology as you, say things you agree with it does not mean they are right. Btw Bawer compares the threat level of Islamism to that of Nazism, he does not say the process is a similar one. So I guess the laughing puppies you employed are laughing at your lack of text comprehension.
True, but that does not change the fact that Hitler's first name was Adolf, not Adolph. It really shows what type of person you are when you can't even admit to a simple spelling error.
And you can coy and paste as much as you like. All you are proving is that muslim immigration causes sociological problems in Europe. I never disputed this, nor will any other sensible European.
But your actual point is that Islamists take over Europe, and so far you (just like Joe C.) have shown nothing that supports this assertion.
Come back when you have more than fear stories and single-person examples.
Oh yes? Which?
Just because Bawer and Wilders, two men with the same right-wing ideology as you, say things you agree with it does not mean they are right. Btw Bawer compares the threat level of Islamism to that of Nazism, he does not say the process is a similar one. So I guess the laughing puppies you employed are laughing at your lack of text comprehension.
True, but that does not change the fact that Hitler's first name was Adolf, not Adolph. It really shows what type of person you are when you can't even admit to a simple spelling error.
And you can coy and paste as much as you like. All you are proving is that muslim immigration causes sociological problems in Europe. I never disputed this, nor will any other sensible European.
But your actual point is that Islamists take over Europe, and so far you (just like Joe C.) have shown nothing that supports this assertion.
Come back when you have more than fear stories and single-person examples.
You try and spin everything I say. Did I misspell Adolf? Yup, so what?
So since I agree with Bawer and Wilders (the most
popular politician in Holland), I suppose they also have shown NOTHING to show the insidious influence of radical Islam on Europe? And the
current danger of the culture war that is being waged?
I suppose these books and Wilders' movie is just one big fairy-tale huh?
:nohead::nohead::nohead::nohead::nohead::nohead::nohead:
Preussen:
"Just because Bawer and Wilders, two men with the same right-wing ideology as you,"
Wikipedia:
His party program states that Wilders' party is committed to "freedom of the individual"; Wilders believes that the Netherlands has been held hostage by elitist (mostly social democrat and left-wing liberal) politicians for decades. He claims to want to give it "back to the people", and in this respect he has been labeled a populist by the establishment.<sup class="noprint Template-Fact">[citation needed]</sup>
His political views (and so the ones of the PVV as well) often overlap those of the murdered Rotterdam politician Pim Fortuyn and his List Pim Fortuyn. There are strong resemblances, certainly on socio-economic issues, to libertarianism. Wilders wants to lower taxes, cut most welfare programs, raise highway speed limits and minimize state regulations by making it mandatory to scrap two legal rules for every new one to be instated. He also wants to reintroduce the mandatory army service. On the crime issue, he has supported a U.S.-style three strikes law with mandatory life sentences after three separate acts of violent crime.<sup id="cite_ref-hardtalk_2-0" class="reference">[3]</sup>
Carry to try again?
:missingte:missingte:missingte:missingte
"Just because Bawer and Wilders, two men with the same right-wing ideology as you,"
Wikipedia:
His party program states that Wilders' party is committed to "freedom of the individual"; Wilders believes that the Netherlands has been held hostage by elitist (mostly social democrat and left-wing liberal) politicians for decades. He claims to want to give it "back to the people", and in this respect he has been labeled a populist by the establishment.<sup class="noprint Template-Fact">[citation needed]</sup>
His political views (and so the ones of the PVV as well) often overlap those of the murdered Rotterdam politician Pim Fortuyn and his List Pim Fortuyn. There are strong resemblances, certainly on socio-economic issues, to libertarianism. Wilders wants to lower taxes, cut most welfare programs, raise highway speed limits and minimize state regulations by making it mandatory to scrap two legal rules for every new one to be instated. He also wants to reintroduce the mandatory army service. On the crime issue, he has supported a U.S.-style three strikes law with mandatory life sentences after three separate acts of violent crime.<sup id="cite_ref-hardtalk_2-0" class="reference">[3]</sup>
Carry to try again?
:missingte:missingte:missingte:missingte
Friendly Muslims : 40 death threats in 2 days - over a cartoon
In response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy Wilders posted the cartoons on his website (1 February 2006), in support of the Danish cartoonists and freedom of speech. Following his publication, Wilders stated he had received more than 40 death threats in just two days.
In November 2006, PVV won, in its first parliamentary election, 9 of the 150 open seats.
The Dutch newspaper Telegraaf reported in May 2007 that Geert Wilders had been shadowed by the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service for years, when he was foreign affairs spokesman for the VVD. During that time, Wilders had been regularly meeting officials at the Israeli Embassy in The Hague.<sup id="cite_ref-6" class="reference">[7]</sup> Sources in the security service said that the agency was surveilling conversations between Wilders and Israeli personnel.<sup id="cite_ref-7" class="reference">[8]</sup> The security services denied the allegations, insisting it had never shadowed or eavesdropped on Wilders.<sup id="cite_ref-8" class="reference">[9]</sup>
On 15 December 2007, Wilders was declared politician of the year by NOS-radio, a mainstream Dutch radio station. The parliamentary press praised his ability to dominate political discussion and to attract the debate and to get into publicity with his well-timed one-liners.<sup id="cite_ref-9" class="reference">[10]</sup> The editors eventually gave the title to Wilders because he was the only one who scored high both among the press as well as the general public.<sup id="cite_ref-10" class="reference">[11]</sup><sup id="cite_ref-11" class="reference">[12]</sup>
In response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy Wilders posted the cartoons on his website (1 February 2006), in support of the Danish cartoonists and freedom of speech. Following his publication, Wilders stated he had received more than 40 death threats in just two days.
In November 2006, PVV won, in its first parliamentary election, 9 of the 150 open seats.
The Dutch newspaper Telegraaf reported in May 2007 that Geert Wilders had been shadowed by the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service for years, when he was foreign affairs spokesman for the VVD. During that time, Wilders had been regularly meeting officials at the Israeli Embassy in The Hague.<sup id="cite_ref-6" class="reference">[7]</sup> Sources in the security service said that the agency was surveilling conversations between Wilders and Israeli personnel.<sup id="cite_ref-7" class="reference">[8]</sup> The security services denied the allegations, insisting it had never shadowed or eavesdropped on Wilders.<sup id="cite_ref-8" class="reference">[9]</sup>
On 15 December 2007, Wilders was declared politician of the year by NOS-radio, a mainstream Dutch radio station. The parliamentary press praised his ability to dominate political discussion and to attract the debate and to get into publicity with his well-timed one-liners.<sup id="cite_ref-9" class="reference">[10]</sup> The editors eventually gave the title to Wilders because he was the only one who scored high both among the press as well as the general public.<sup id="cite_ref-10" class="reference">[11]</sup><sup id="cite_ref-11" class="reference">[12]</sup>
