An explosion blew the door off a Muslim school in a southern Dutch town and shattered windows across the street yesterday, Dutch television reported. There were no reports of injuries.
Pictures showed the burnt-out entrance of the school which was empty at the time of the attack at around 3:30am. Police suspected it was related to the murder last week of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Islamic radical, the report said.
Van Gogh's killing sparked a series of attacks over the weekend, including two attempts to burn down mosques. Although mainstream Muslim groups condemned the killing, it has caused an outpouring of anger.
Vandals threw red paint on Saturday night on an Amsterdam center that aids immigrants, many of them Muslim. The Emcemo center is located several blocks from the spot where Van Gogh was killed, and its director, Abdou Menebhi, told local TV station AT5 that the vandals were racists.
In the town of Huizen, police arrested two men they say were caught preparing to ignite a fire at the An-Nasr mosque on Friday night, national news service NOS reported. A mosque in the city of Breda sustained minor fire damage in another reported arson attempt.
Earlier last week, a small fire was set at a mosque in Utrecht, police said, and a pig's head was left in a plastic bag outside a mosque in Amsterdam.
NOS reported on Sunday that pamphlets with the image of a pig and a slur against Muslims were circulating in Rotterdam.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
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