Free Republic

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The Dutch city of Rotterdam and its university have fired Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan as an adviser to the city over his involvement with groups that detractors say hurt his role as an expert on integration issues. Ramadan is a visiting professor of theology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands' second-largest city. Rotterdam's mayor is Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim who was formerly junior minister for social affairs and who has vowed to ease tensions between the city's native Dutch and a growing immigrant population. Ramadan was criticized after media reported last week he was hosting...

Amsterdam - Sex might be fun, but the Dutch don't find it as fun as a pleasant trip to the bathroom, if survey results reported Thursday by the ANP news agency are to be believed. According to the poll of 1,000 adults, 88 per cent listed a visit to the bathroom as something "they enjoy the most," making it the most popular activity chosen, reported ANP. Only 21 per cent did the same for sex. ANP described the survey as "representative." It was conducted by the Intomart GfK institute for the popular scientific magazine Quest. The second most popular activity,...

Amsterdam, Netherlands, Aug 4, 2009 / 03:07 am (CNA).- The Amsterdam offices of an organizer for the upcoming World Congress of Families were defaced with paint and vandalized with obscenities and anti-Christian slogans last Thursday, prompting the pro-family conference’s leaders to pledge they will not be intimidated by “radical opposition.” The World Congress of Families V (WCF V) is to take place in Amsterdam on August 10-12 at the RAI Centre. In its pamphlet for the event, the Congress describes itself as the world’s largest gathering of pro-family leaders and grass-roots activists. It bills the event as “the most exciting...

Amsterdam becoming the car tipping capital of the world?Ever seen one of those little Smart cars? They may be pretty rare in the US, but in Europe you'll have a hard time not being able to find the little buggers. Especially in the major cities of Europe, the small cars are extremely popular, as they are a breeze to park. In fact, they are so easy to park, that many owners can fit two of them in a single parking spot. Smart car owners in Amsterdam may be starting to have second thoughts about their little cars, because of an...

Pajamas Media | Friday, December 12, 2008 The funeral for Shirwa Ahmed last week in Burnsville, Minnesota, punctuated a growing national security threat metastasizing inside the U.S. — one Homeland Security and law enforcement authorities have quickly taken note of. Ahmed, who killed himself in a suicide bombing attack in Somalia in October, is just one of up to 40 men from the Twin Cities area who have disappeared and are feared to have returned to their homeland for training with the al-Shabaab terrorist group to wage jihad. The FBI is investigating similar disappearances in other major Somali communities in...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Amsterdam city council is turning its attention to a pressing problem for one of the city's key business sectors -- banking and credit for prostitutes who can't get accounts from mainstream institutions. The city's red light district is famed the world over for its women in tiny windows and even tinier clothing, but despite the trade being legal, many banks shy away from taking the ladies on as customers. As part of the city's "Project 1012" to remake the De Wallen neighborhood, which includes the sex district, the city council has been asked to find a way...

A British-born suicide bomber plotted to bring down a packed passenger aircraft over the Atlanttic at the same time that the shoe bomber Richard Reid targeted an American Airlines flight, the Old Bailey heard today. But Saajid Badat changed his mind and dismantled his own shoe bomb, which was designed to evade airport security. Badat, 25, from Gloucester, admitted conspiring to blow up an aircraft between January 1 1999 and November 28, 2003 in a surprise change of plea today. He had been due to stand trial for the offence. Intelligence services believe Badat had been conspiring with Reid, a...

A park near Amsterdam has unveiled information signs pointing out spots where officials say gay men are known to have sex, so visitors are not taken by surprise. The signs "clearly indicate what is happening in each zone; also those where gay men are known to practice 'cruising'," municipal spokeswoman Manon Koffijberg said. Cruising is a slang word used to describe the act of trawling for casual sex. There had been recent complaints of gay bashing in the Slotervaart area, populated by a large group of immigrants of Muslim origin, with reports of robberies and violence against gay men in...

Terrorist attacks foiled - seven arrested Thursday 12 March 2009 Six men and one woman have been arrested on suspicion of preparing to carry out terrorist attacks on shops in Amsterdam Zuidoost on Thursday. One of those arrested is a family member of a man connected to the Madrid bombing five years ago, said Amsterdam police chief Bernard Welten at a press confernce on Thursday evening. The arrests have reduced the threat of attacks but a risk remains, said Welten. All of those detained by the police are Dutch with a Moroccan background and are aged between 19 and 64...

It appears that three employees of The Boeing Co. were among those killed in the Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam, as they returned from a business trip to Ankara, Turkey. A fourth employee was critically injured. The four Boeing engineers from Seattle were in Ankara to assist with the modification work on 737 jets that will be used as airborne electronic warfare planes by the Turkish military. They were returning home on the same kind of plane, a Boeing 737, when it crashed Wednesday about a mile short of a runway at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Boeing said Thursday night...

NINE people have died after a plane crashed in Amsterdam today. The Turkish Airlines carrier slammed into a field and split into three pieces after missing the runway at the country's Schipol Airport by just two miles. More than 50 of the 134 passengers on board were injured, 25 were said to be in a serious condition. The Turkish Airlines 737-800 was not on fire, but "definitely sliced in half" a spokesman said. Eyewitnesses said Flight 1951 landed at "massive speed" in the field by the A9 motorway. Dutch television showed what appeared to be covered bodies on the...

Sometimes a story just doesn't seem to be "all there." Cinnamon Stillwell suspected as much in a NewsBusters item on January 10: Call me overly suspicious, but the story of 16-year-old Farris Hassan traveling to Iraq on a whim strikes me as unbelievable. Hassan's interview with Rita Cosby of MSNBC, a Florida newspaper columnist's skepticism, and a January 18 posting by the Northeast Intelligence Network (NIN), which describes itself as "a small contingent of experienced investigators ..... founded by veteran private investigator Douglas J. Hagmann," all appear to confirm Stillwell's suspicions. What is known of Farris Hassan's saga at this...

Europe, or a significant segment of Europe, unfailingly discloses its frequent willingness to appease totalitarian foes of freedom. In modern times Europe gladly has served as a cradle of fascism on the right, communism on the left and in between all sorts of variations of the two, joined at the hip with a common blood-soaked bigotry directed at Jews. Since 9/11, and despite Muslim terrorists striking on European soil, that segment of Europe ready to appease any totalitarian assault on freedom has contorted itself to accommodate the Islamist agenda. The latest evidence of this is the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's...

Note: Video included. January 21, 2009 For hate speech -- after declining to do so last year, which means that Islamic supremacist groups in the Netherlands have kept up the pressure on lawmakers until they got the outcome they wanted. Hate speech, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and hate speech laws are tools in the hands of the powerful that they can use to silence the powerless and crush dissent. And make no mistake: even though the Muslims in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the West present themselves as embattled victims of racism and "Islamophobia," that...

This video (thanks to M.B.) depicts Dutch parliamentarian Harry van Bommel of the Socialist Party and other Leftist useful idiots calling for intifada against Israel during a Jew-hate, pro-jihad terror rally in Amsterdam yesterday -- while the crowd behind them (at 1:05) chants "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Amsterdam hosted a Christmas celebration for its gay community on Sunday featuring a nativity tableau with a male Mary in drag that church organizations denounced as an affront to traditional values.

New restrictions on marijuana selling cafés, a ban on the sale of magic mushrooms and plans to clean up Amsterdam's red light district have been announced across Holland. "The nation's ideals are being tested by the reality they brought," said sociologist Dick Houtman of Rotterdam's Erasmus University. "The Netherlands went further in allowing all sorts of liberties than many other countries. The test is severe. There is a feeling that our tolerance is the principal cause of many of the problems we experience now. The debate is about where liberty and tolerance should end and where order should begin." A...

... Opponents of the clean-up - including coffee-shop owners and the prostitutes' union, De Rode Draad (Red Thread), which represents 20,000 Dutch prostitutes - told The Observer yesterday that they believed that, far from reducing crime, it would encourage drug dealers and prostitutes to go underground in areas where they were banned. They also warned that the new clampdown on drugs and the sex industry would have a profound effect on the economics of a city famous for both things. 'Amsterdam is the city of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll,' said Metje Blaak, a spokeswoman for De Rode...

Amsterdam unveiled plans Saturday to close brothels, sex shops and marijuana cafes in its ancient city center as part of a major effort to drive organized crime out of the tourist haven. The city is targeting businesses that "generate criminality," including gambling parlors, and the so-called "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold openly. Also targeted are peep shows, massage parlors and souvenir shops used by drug dealers for money-laundering. "I think that the new reality will be more in line with our image as a tolerant and crazy place, rather than a free zone for criminals" said Lodewijk Asscher, a...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Amsterdam will close almost a fifth of its marijuana cafes to comply with a national ban on having them near schools, the mayor said Friday.