Harry's Place

Golden Dawn has been in the headlines again this week. One of its MPs, Panayiotis Iliopoulos, was accused of shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ in Parliament.
Now it is being reported that the party has published a letter issuing a sinister ultimatum to Muslims.
In a letter sent via post to the Muslim Association of Greece yesterday, extremist-right party Golden [...]

In a welcome move, the House of Lords has ruled that caste should be deemed a protected characteristic in a new clause in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill.  This follows an earlier defeat for this amendment in the House of Commons. Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, commented:
We are delighted [...]

The New York Times reports:
As an elementary school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old [...]

Shimon Peres travelled to Paris’s Gare du Nord on March 8 for discussions relating to the Middle East peace process.  It is claimed that black and North African workers were discriminated against in efforts to ensure that “no Muslim employees … welcome the Head of the State of Israel”.
The SUD-Rail statement called on SNCF to [...]

Guest post by Eve Garrard
I know very little about events in Greece, so what follows rests entirely on information provided by others. But if they’re right, there’s a lot to be worried about.
A British academic currently in Greece recently sent me some information about the Golden Dawn party and some of their supporters, [...]

I do recommend this very interesting BBC Radio 4 programme, presented by Jenny Cuffe. The title is perhaps slightly misleading as this is a wide-ranging survey of Muslim extremism in France, including an analysis of antisemitic attacks – as well as the Merah murders, there is a discussion of the discovery of a terrorist plot following [...]

I was interested to read that France’s interior ministry was (apparently) attempting to shut down a website which draws attention to allegations of violence and discrimination by the French police against Muslims, citing defamation as the reason behind this step. A Press TV report is the main source for this story, but here is a link [...]

Although this video showing a thuggish BNP patrol harassing anti-fascists was disturbing, the furthest right parties in Britain are generally in a welcome state of disarray. This is not so in other European countries – France, Hungary and particularly Greece.
It’s chilling to read the steady stream of news stories charting the rising popularity of Golden [...]

That would appear to be the message of Seumas Milne and the Stop the War Coalition to the people of Timbuktu and elsewhere in northern Mali recently liberated with the help of French forces from the rule of Islamist extremists.

Three tweets on Europe here which I thought might prompt an interesting discussion, either about the projected EU referendum itself, or on referenda more generally. Richard Dawkins opened the exchange by asking:
“In UK We elect MPs to decide complex issues. Why a plebiscite on, of ALL things, a subject as complex & hard to understand [...]