British Muslims are abandoning their traditional support for Gordon Brown’s Labour party and instead look set to back Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in this week’s election, community organizers have found. A poll of British Muslims conducted last week found that almost three-quarters of respondents believed the Liberal Democrats offered fairer policies than either the Labour…
Fatima Mohamed, municipal councilor at Gines city Council (a small town in Seville) and member of the conservative Popular Party, resigned. She declared that she was being discriminated by her own party because she wore the hijab. She also stated that the Popular Party had used her in order to “sell integration”, but that her…
Aygül Özkan becomes the new social minister in the German state of Niedersachsen, and thereby the first politician of Turkish background in such high office. More surprisingly, it is the conservative party CDU who lifted her into this office, considering their generally rigorous policies on immigration and integration. Before coming to office this week, Özkan…
Recent events in Europe, from the cartoon crisis in Denmark to the controversy over the construction of minarets in Switzerland, have brought the status of Islam in the secular public sphere to the forefront of European political debates.
During a visit to America, Dutch Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin met with Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to discuss the ways the Netherlands deals with ‘local terrorists’, such as Mohammed Bouyeri. Trouw reports that the American were particularly interested in the ways national security services in the Netherlands work.
