Short news

The night after the Dutch People's Union (NVU) demonstration in Zoetermeer on 11 November, members of Jeugdstorm, a group of very young and very radical nazis, held a birthday party at a house in The Hague. When the beer ran out, the nazis trooped to a nearby youth home, where another party was going on, and made aggressive demands for drink, threatening and abusing the people there. When their demands were not met, they kicked, masked with shawls and armed with broken bottles, at the door of the premises. A police officer passing on a bike saw the disturbance and called for backup, knowing that the place where the nazi party had been going on was infamous for being a centre of disorder. Soon afterwards, the police entered the house in search of the troublemakers but were met with resistance from the, partly drunken, nazis, who pushed them out of the door. Eventually, the police arrested 13 of them, some of them resisting and shouting, when they were handcuffed such pleasantries as "Sieg Heil" and 'Fucking Jews'. Several leaders of the nazi group, including Alwin Walther, Misha van Dijck, Ivo Henze and Dave Blom were subsequently convicted and jailed.

The sentences did not, it appears, deter their nazi pals because some days later, on 17 November, another notorious nazi from the NVU's strong-arm squad beat up two young bikers in the Flemish town of Beerse. Robin van Opstal, who weighs 130 kilos and hangs out with a group of boneheads, was arrested and, because he broke the nose of one of the youngsters, charged with assault. This is not the first time that van Opstal has been arrested outside the Netherlands: in March 2005 he was convicted in Dortmund after assaulting an Ethiopian man and driving his car at him. His victim was lucky to survive the attack. Van Opstal was kept in a German prison for five months before he heard that he had been given 2 years conditional, a fine and a 3-year ban from entering Germany. The judge was clear that day, telling Van Opstal in no uncertain terms: "The time when figures like you were ruling is over, and this court will see to it that is stays that way. Go back to the Netherlands and never show your face here again".

By Jeroen Bosch of Alert! and Antifa-Net in Utrecht reports