Word: consensus
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...part, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat publicly supported Abdullah, though a senior official of the Palestinian Authority says that privately Arafat worries that the Saudi initiative is just meaningless talk. The consensus within the Authority, this source notes, is that Abdullah was less interested in helping the Palestinians than in improving Saudi Arabia's image...
...Netherlands ought to be one of the toughest places in Europe for the far right to get a toehold. Prosperous and with low unemployment, tolerant and proudly multicultural, the country has long been a place where the politicians fine-tune consensus in long, well-behaved coalition talks. But into that idyll last week crashed Pim Fortuyn, 54, who rode an unapologetically anti-immigration platform to a substantial victory in local elections in Rotterdam, the country's second city, where many of the country's 800,000 Muslims live. His local party, Livable Rotterdam, won 17 out of the 45 seats...
Fortuyn clearly holds no truck with consensus. Less than a month ago he was tossed out of Livable Netherlands, the national party he joined late last year, for insulting Muslims. His opinions should have come as a surprise to no one. A former academic sociologist, the openly gay Fortuyn gained notoriety in the late 1990s through his spicy column in the weekly Elsevier. In 1997 he published a book calling Islam "a backward culture," saying: "For Muslims, as a homosexual, I am less than a pig. I am proud that in the Netherlands I can come out for my homosexuality...
Would that it were that simple. Like others of his ilk, notably Austrian Jörg Haider, Fortuyn has surely profited from a sense of public frustration over the cozy consensus among established Dutch political parties. He has played incessantly on distrust of Muslims, and his promises to beef up police evidently appeals to urban dwellers who feel unsafe on their own streets. "Everyone in my local pub voted for him, because there is a small gang of Moroccan kids that terrorize the neighborhood," says Cathy Brouwer, a human-resources worker in Rotterdam. "They somehow think Fortuyn is the answer...
...consensus among the Masters, however, is that the most important function of the tutors is simply to support the students—something that is not quantifiable...