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Protesters have clashed with immigration supporters and police forces during planned far-right demonstrations
Organised by anti-Islam group PEGIDA, cities across Europe and Australia saw thousands take to the streets
The confrontational rallies were held in cities that included Prague, Amsterdam, Dresden, Calais and Canberra
Former English Defence League (EDL) leader Tommy Robinson joined 200 supporters at a rally in Birmingham

Violent scuffles broke out across Europe today as thousands of people taking part in far-right anti-Islam protests clashed with pro-immigration groups and riot control police.

Police in Dresden, Germany, saw about 2,000 protesters at a rally organised by the group Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West, making it the biggest of a coordinated series of demonstrations across European cities.

Known by its German acronym PEGIDA, the group emerged in Dresden two years ago and has become a magnet for far-right and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Nationalist groups in Europe have been galvanized by the unprecedented influx of refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East last year. Today similar, smaller PEGIDA-style protests were planned in France, Britain, Poland, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

70 million more than previously thought. What is the common denominator?

A recent Telegraph report has confirmed that “Almost 70m more women than previously thought are estimated to have undergone FGM.” It indicated that the 30 countries where female genital mutilation is prevalent are “mainly in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.” Robert Spencer explains what these countries have in common HERE.

In response to this frightening and tragic report, The Glazov Gang is running its special episode with Dr. Mark Christian, a doctor from Egypt who gives a first-hand and harrowing account of his effort to heal Muslim girls who were victimized by FGM. As a former Muslim Imam, he discusses the Islamic texts that inspire and sanction FGM.

Don’t miss it!

North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Sunday carrying what it has said is a satellite, South Korea’s defense ministry said, in defiance of United Nations sanctions barring it from using ballistic missile technology.
North Korea had notified U.N. agencies that it planned to launch a rocket carrying an Earth observation satellite, triggering opposition from governments that see it as a long-range missile test. It initially gave a Feb. 8-25 time frame for the launch but changed that to Feb. 7-14 on Saturday.

The rocket was launched on a southward trajectory, as planned, passing over Japan’s southern Okinawa islands, Japan’s NHK reported, and appeared to have successfully separated its first stage booster, South Korea’s Yonhap reported.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called the launch “absolutely unacceptable.”

French socialist Christiane Taubira — the minister of justice, also known as the “keeper of the Seals” — formally resigned last week over what she called “a major political disagreement” with French socialist President François Hollande on anti-terror policies.

At stake was a constitutional amendment known as the Protection of the Nation Constitutional Act (Loi constitutionnelle de Protection de la Nation) that would strip persons who join ISIS or other jihadist networks, or who commit “grave crimes against the life of the Nation,” of their French citizenship.

The measure is largely symbolic. Still, it is immensely popular: according to an OpinionWay/Le Figaro poll, it is supported by 85% of the French as a whole, 80% of the socialist voters, and even 64% of the hard-left voters.

But Taubira, who was supposed to endorse and defend it as the minister of justice, claimed that it unfairly differentiated between the ethnic French and other groups of French citizens. Indeed, a first version targeted only binationals and had to be corrected. Taubira resigned nevertheless. Hollande and the socialist prime minister Manuel Valls may have preferred she stay.

Taubira, 63, can be described in some ways as the French Barack Obama.

BRUSSELS—The Belgian government, reacting to the major role terrorists from Brussels played in the Paris terror attacks, unveiled a program Friday to combat Islamist radicalization in and around the city.

The plans include the hiring of 1,000 new police officers across the country by 2019, with 300 of them added this year and deployed in eight municipalities in the Brussels region.

Interior Minister Jan Jambon said the additional police force in Brussels would focus on cutting off revenue sources for extremist groups by countering illicit trade in arms, drugs and false travel documents. Brussels police will also increase the monitoring of places of worship known for extremist preaching, he said.

The plans form part of a €298 million ($332 million) countrywide investment in counterterrorism that includes 110 more judiciary staff and the addition of 103 domestic intelligence service members.

The government also announced the recruitment of 70 additional Special Forces by 2019, as well as the installation of 260 extra surveillance cameras on highways and enhanced security checks at the country’s airports and train stations.

The Nov. 13 Paris attacks, which left 130 people dead, were partly perpetrated by Belgian nationals and plotted in Belgium, investigators have said. Belgian authorities have arrested 11 suspects, all originating from the Brussels region, in relation to the attacks.

The focal point of the Belgium’s much-anticipated move is the Canal Plan, named after the waterway linking Brussels with the adjacent town of Vilvoorde. It is meant to harmonize the de-radicalization strategies of seven of the 19 Brussels municipalities and Vilvoorde, all located along the canal and most touched by radicalized inhabitants departing to the Middle East to join Islamic State and other jihadist groups.

The plans of the center-right Belgian government have faced sharp public criticism from the mostly left-wing local Brussels mayors, who are in charge of implementing it.

Africa’s Muslim belt is getting bloodier.

Boko Haram—the regional affiliate of Islamic State and one of the world’s deadliest terrorist groups—has accelerated its campaign of almost daily suicide bombings. Just last month, the group massacred 86 people, many of them children, in the Nigerian village of Dalori and 32 others in the Cameroonian village of Bodo.

To the west, al Qaeda’s regional franchise has been waging war on the government of Mali and expanded its reach last month to the previously peaceful country of Burkina Faso, slaying at least 30 people—many of them Westerners—in an assault on a luxury hotel. In the east, another al Qaeda affiliate, Somalia’s al-Shabaab, overran an African Union military base three weeks ago and slaughtered more than 100 Kenyan troops.

In 2009, the American journalist Christopher Caldwell famously characterized the changes that a massive non-European, non-Judeo-Christian, immigration was forcing over Europe as a “revolution.” We may now be on the brink of a counter-revolution, and that can be as violent and far-reaching as revolution itself.

Last year’s massacres in Paris (the attacks on satirical cartoonists and a kosher supermarket’s customers in January 2015, then the November 13 killing spree) were a tipping point : the French – and by extension, most Europeans — realized that unchecked immigration could lead to civil war.

Then there was the Christmas crisis in Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean. On December 24, a fire was activated at an immigrant-populated neighborhood in Ajaccio, the capital of Southern Corsica. As soon as the firemen arrived, they were attacked by local youths, Muslims of North African descent. Such ambushes have been part of French life for years. This time, however, the ethnic Corsicans retaliated; for four days, they rampaged through the Muslim neighborhoods, shouting Arabi Fora! (Get the Arabs out, in Corsican). One of Ajaccio’s five mosques was vandalized.

Then, there was the New Year’s crisis in Germany and other Northern European countries. On December 31, one to two thousand male Muslim immigrants and refugees swarmed the Banhofvorplatz in Cologne, a piazza located between the railway Central Station and the city’s iconic medieval cathedral. As it turned out during later in the evening and the night, they intended to “have fun”: to hunt, harass, or molest the “immodest” and presumably “easy” German women and girls who celebrated New Year’s Eve at the restaurants and bars nearby, or to steal their money. 766 complaints were lodged. Similar incidents took place in other German cities, like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, as well as in Stockholm and Kalmar in Sweden, and Helsinki in Finland.

While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.

At least 10,000 refugee children have vanished after arriving in Europe with many being forced into sex work and slavery, officials believe.

Thousands of young migrants have been targeted by criminals and are now missing, according to the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol.

The news emerged as charity Save the Children estimated that around 26,000 children were forced to travel into Europe alone last year.

Brain Donald, Europol’s chief of staff, told Mark Townsend at the Observer: ‘It is not unreasonable to say that we are looking at 10,000-plus children.

‘We just don’t know where they are, what they are doing and whom they are with.’

Facebook has been slow to take down pages inciting violence against Israelis and Jews.

Although Facebook’s ground rules officially prohibit bullying, harassment, and threatening language, last year it received numerous complaints about online incitement. On January 18, Facebook launched an initiative to prevent anti-Muslim hate speech on its German platform. But, according to a lawsuit filed in New York state court and a highly-publicized “experiment,” Facebook has no problem with anti-Jewish incitement.

Last October 20, the German daily Bild printed a double-page newspaper spread documenting racist vitriol posted on Facebook against migrants. On November 10 – days before the Paris attacks – Hamburg prosecutors launched an investigation into Facebook for allegedly failing to remove racist postings. The investigation was reportedly motivated by concern over “how the country’s long-dormant far-right was using Facebook to mobilize” against the influx of refugees. In other words, it was motivated by concern over anti-Muslim and anti-Arab posts.

Perhaps stung by that criticism, mere days after two Muslims murdered fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed that Facebook would “create a peaceful and safe environment” for Muslim users.

Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week came reports of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on social media.

In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations and only violence is left.

The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.

Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.