How Long Can You Make My Thread Get?

nimh, i listened to an interview with a woman from the Netherlands today. Muslim, deputy mayor of some town. I need to find out more. She was an interesting speaker. Who was she?

Thinking about Mrs. Doubtfire, there are a number of movies which have men dressed up as women. "Some like it Hot" and "Tootsie" come to mind. Anybody else think of any others?

The measure of what it takes to shake a proudly liberal democracy to its foundations has been revealed over these past two weeks to be the murder of one man.

Theo Van Gogh, an incendiary film maker, was killed by an alleged Islamic extremist. A verse from the Koran was left pinned to the dead man's chest by the knife used to murder him. In retaliation, the peaceful people of Holland burned, or tried to burn at least twenty Islamic elementary schools and mosques. In response, a slightly smaller number of Protestant churches were set on fire.

And, in a television poll last week, the Dutch overwhelming selected Pim Fortuyn,an anti immigration politician who was assassinated a couple of years ago, as the "greatest Dutchman ever"-- ahead of William of Orange, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, and Anne Frank.

Clearly, there are problems in that country that go far beyond the gruesome murder of one outspoken film maker. Paul Scheffer has been writing about the tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in his country for years. He is a professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.

Some Dutch politicians have had reason to fear for their own safety over the past couple of weeks. One of those is Fatima Elatik. Ms. Elatik is a Muslim who was born and raised in Holland. She is deputy mayor of the town of Zeeburg in Amsterdam.[/color]


Michael spoke with both from a studio in Amsterdam.

The secret are vivid interventions of myself together with the eloquent politician Fatima Elatik at a conference of the EurArabian Dialog in Casablanca. We attacked the ideology of therefore irritated Arab nationalist leaders like Abid Jabri. I had to inscribe myself for an intervention. Because my name 'Ron' was not understood, I proposed 'Harun el-Rachid' as my name. This fact caused the astonishing reaction: "Ah, now the identity of your eloquent partner is clear to us: she is without any doubt the storyteller Sheherazade...!"

Born in Amsterdam, Fatima Elatik is a very conscious muslima
- actually an assistant-mayor of Zeeburg, a part of the city of Amsterdam.

Who is next in line to win?