UK: Lock 'em up and throw away the key...

Now here's a War on Terror idea that I can really get behind... Gitmo on the Thames. After all, Germany is now talking about doing the same thing.

Police in Unlimited Detention Plea.

Police chiefs are demanding the power to lock up terror suspects indefinitely, it has emerged. Reopening the debate over detention without trial, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) called for some suspects to be held for "as long as it takes".

al-Guardian's take. Complete with outraged lefty response.

The lefties are going to bellyache about this for a while so they might as well lock up this guy in the interim. Fixer for 7/21 plot free in London.

A SUSPECTED Al-Qaeda operative who is believed by MI5 to have played a key role in the events leading up to the July 21 failed bombings is at liberty and living in east London. Mohammed al-Ghabra, a 27-year-old Syrian who has been given British citizenship, is said by security sources to have arranged for the leader of the failed 21/7 London suicide attacks to travel to Pakistan for terrorist training.

German arrests at protest against E Berlin mosque

This is not good. Tarring the protesters with the Neo-Nazi brush.

German police have arrested 15 far-right extremists and five counter-protestors in the latest round of clashes over the controversial construction of the first mosque in the former East Berlin.

Some 340 police were deployed to deal with almost 600 demonstrators taking part in a protest on Wednesday night against the planned Ahmadiyya mosque in the Pankow-Heinersdorf neighborhood.

It ended in violent clashes between police, protestors and counter-protestors, police said on Thursday.

Officers said that the troublemakers, believed to be far-right extremists, now face charges of assault, disturbing the peace and resisting the police.

A point of contention...

Although the debate has been hijacked by the far-right, the main objections come from residents who insist their opposition is not ideological. They say they oppose the mosque purely on the grounds that there are no Muslims in the neighborhood and therefore no need for a mosque. Others say they fear an "Islamization" of the area, and that the new building will turn a quiet part of Berlin into a racial trouble-spot.

Muslim authorities argue that the mosque near the city's Tegel airport had become too crowded and that land in Pankow-Heinersdorf, which used to belong to the communist East German state, was cheap.

Another country heard from: Germany protests huge mosque.

Something stinks in Cologne: Huge Mosque stirs protest.

The construction of one of Europe's biggest mosques near to a globally famous Christian landmark has sparked a furious row in Germany.

Immigration and integration are hugely sensitive questions in Germany, which is home to a Turkish community of several million. But almost within the shadow of Cologne Cathedral, political correctness has now been replaced by bitter confrontation as the city's Muslims begin to build a 2,000-capacity mosque with twin minarets that will reach 170ft.

"Muslims have been here for 40 years, yet people are praying in back rooms," said Seyda Can, an Islamic theologian at the Turkish Islamic Union in Cologne. "There are 120,000 Muslims in Cologne, that's 12 per cent of the population. We should not hide."

Work will begin in the autumn on the £15 million mosque, which will include huge glass and stone cupolas and two six-storey minarets.

And in a case of the lion laying down with the lamb:

"It's not a popular plan," said Joerg Uckermann, the district's deputy mayor. "We don't want to build a Turkish ghetto in Ehrenfeld. I know about Londonistan and I don't want that here."

Mr Uckermann is part of a curious coalition of protest that has united Jewish intellectuals and neo-Nazis. Leading the charge is Ralph Giordano, a prominent Jewish author, who wrote recently that Germany was witnessing a "clash of two completely different cultures" and questioned whether they could ever be reconciled.

Stating that he had received death threats for his opinions, he added: "What kind of a state are we in that I can face a fatwa in Germany?"

Indeed.

Berlin angry at Muslim segregation demand.
The dialogue between the German government and the country's Muslim community is heating up shortly before the second leg of an integration conference. Maria Boehmer, Germany's envoy for integration matters and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, has harshly criticized a demand made by the German Muslim community to separate girls and boys in the physical education classroom.

"We will not allow that a small minority of backward people wants to install (in Germany) the rules of their grandfathers," she told the Neue Osnarbruecker Zeitung newspaper.

...a small minority of backward people. That's one way to look at it. She's got the backward part right. There are an estimated 3.2 million Muslims in Germany. Most are guest workers from Turkey.

A verrry interesting op-ed piece from Der Spiegel.
"Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you're saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you'll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party's hardcore with a load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to Washington -- just look at Gerhard Schröder. In fact, you could, like leading German politicians in the debate over the planned American missile shield in Europe, be accused of having "an almost unbelievable lack of knowledge" by a former NATO general, and even that wouldn't matter. It's all about what you believe, not what you know.

Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of "24" and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American's supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery.

Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn't making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there's no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness."

Read it all. It's worth your time.