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...aspect of mosque design provokes more anger than most: the minaret. Across Europe, minarets on city skylines have become a political issue. In the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter, a leader of the right-wing Vlaams Belang party, decried a new Rotterdam mosque because its minarets were higher than the lights of the city's soccer stadium. "These kinds of symbols have to stop," he told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. In 2007, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that minarets shouldn't be "ostentatiously higher than church steeples...
...some Cologne residents disagree. Members of the right-wing Pro Cologne group have protested the $20 million mosque, arguing that the two 166-ft. (51 m) minarets will spoil the skyline, now dominated by the city's famous Gothic cathedral. Construction is going ahead, and Böhm hopes his design will foster an openness that will one day silence the critics. His plan for the complex, due to be completed in 2010, calls for a piazza with a fountain and a cafe, designed to draw non-Muslims to the site. The local Muslim elders hope that, once there, visitors...
More change might flow from a landmark trial underway in Istanbul. The case pits the state against a shadowy ultra-right-wing network allegedly led by retired generals. Prosecutors accuse the group of staging bomb attacks and assassinations in a bid to overthrow the ruling Justice and Development Party and create a pretext for military rule. Turkey is no stranger to coups - the military has stepped in to push the government this way or that three times in as many decades. As recently as 2007, a veiled threat prompted early elections...
...swearing-in speech before the Knesset, Netanyahu appeared to soften his tough stance on the Palestinians, directing his words as much toward Washington as to Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu, who leads a sprawling coalition of right-wing and religious parties that is tempered by the center-left Labor Party, vowed to improve economic, security and political ties with Israel's Arab neighbors. "We do not want to rule the Palestinians," he said. But nowhere in his speech did he mention the two-state solution championed by Washington. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel...
...Netanyahu may viscerally oppose this plan. Even if he does not, selling it to his right-wing coalition partners may prove impossible. They refuse to divide Jerusalem and want to plow ahead with more Jewish settlements in the West Bank. As part of a coalition dealmaker, Netanyahu pledged to allow the construction of a new settlement of 3,500 dwellings outside Jerusalem that would surround the city's Arab neighborhoods. And his choice for Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who has pronounced anti-Arab views and is under criminal investigation for allegedly taking bribes, has left the Americans and the Europeans...