26-year-old Mahinur Özdemir is the first woman to enter a parliament in Europe with a headscarf. The daughter of a Turkish green grocer in Brussels immigrant quarter Schaarbeek,she is the youngest delegate in Brussels new regional parliament.Not only in Belgium,the headscarf has fueled discussion about religious symbols in public,about tolerance,and about integration policies. A portrait…
The European rabbinical umbrella organization “Conference of European Rabbis” (CER) boycotted an interfaith conference in Belgium after it was determined that Muslim delegates included alleged members of the Muslim brotherhood movement. The meeting, co-hosted by the European commission and the European Parliament, took place in Brussels on Monday of this week. The interfaith meeting was…
Italian prosecutors have accused two men, arrested last year for link to human trafficking, of being leading al Qaeda figures in Europe and involved in training militants for suicide attacks. Police in the southern Italian city of Bari said that the two men, identified as Syrian imam Bassam Ayachi and French computer engineer Raphael Gendron,…
According to a survey recently revealed by the European Fundamental Rights Agency, 75 percent of Turkish or North African origin feel the are discriminated against too much and too often. Also of note, is that 80% of those surveyed said that they did not go to the police when the were victims of a racist…
Belgian officials lodged a legal complaint against an Islamic religion teacher in Brussels, who is accused of denying the Holocaust. The community’s education minister made the accusation after the teacher voiced skepticism following a talk at public school by a concentration camp survivor. “For the first time someone told me that my story was greatly…
