Jay,

>I think I will never understand what you are trying to convey. A group of of agressive people standing around is not what I understood us to be talking about. Do you mean gangs? We have gangs, but the laws and punishments are the same for non-gang crimes. Do we put more effort into trying to find criminals within the gangs as opposed to in the suburbs? Yes. But they are protected and punished equally. I was under the distinct impression that we were talking about a group of people within society, not specifically people standing around in a group.

On one hand yes, I'm talking about gangs. In holland theorectically you can get convicted just by beeing a member of a criminal organisation. A law that only applies to groups, not to individuals.

OTOH, we identify there is a problem in the muslim society here in holland. A problem that goes deeper than just laws and religion and has to do with the tolerance we proudly say we have. In one than more ways we could say that we allowed trojan horses to enter our society. Note that I'm not talking about muslims in general, but certain groups within the muslim society. On thing that a particulary difficult for muslims in general is to critisize the koran. Most christians are way past that stage. Can you imagine a muslim version of "The life of brain" by monthy python? You can guess what will happen. And this would not be the first time remember that iranian writer salman rushdi (did I spell did right) writing about the koran? And what happened?

The dutch government now is talking about installing emergency laws to send back people to their own country if they are practising "fundamentalism". The dutch are now particulary pointing to seem radical imams that seem to preach hate against non-muslim people. Also 'we' have not recieved any statement from any imam distantiating from the terroristic murder on Theo van Gogh. In our eyes (and I also expect in the eye of many muslim) an Imam should preach peace and tolerance and correct people with fundamentalistic ideas. But the reality seems not to be that way on at least some cases.

Therefore the dutch government now is focussing on muslim fundamentalism an putting more effort in this group to solve certain problems than in others. And there certainly are others. Some people form the netherland antilles are also pretty notorious for criminal activity, but don't seem to be a trheat to national security.

Walter,