The media thus usually constructs a simplified national reality that not accurately reflects the true nature of our multi-level political systems. With respect to Germany, it may be indicative of this trend that Wolfgang Klein, a former EU correspondent for the German public network ARD, who once produced a very informative yet little known programme about the EU, has now moved to Berlin and become the editor of the much less informative, yet influential, political talk show “Christiansen”. Gresham’s law applies to eyeballs, too.

After the first direct election to the European Parliament political scientists Karlheinz Reif and Herrman Schmitt stipulated that it was largely a “second order national contest”. Subsequent analyses largely confirmed their intuitive proposition that national, not the European political agendas and political alternatives are the most decisive factors for European voters - while the electoral consequences are deemed less important. Reif and Schmitt’s research was published at a time when the European Parliament did in fact not have nearly as much influence as it has today. Strangely though, in light of the seeming predominance of the national political sphere, it does still seem somewhat cynically appropriate to group the EU elections with local elections, as in Britain or some regions of Germany - why not get over with all second order elections at the same time?

So should you still have doubts about your choice for the European election and will cast your vote in Germany, why not take a look at the European “Wahl-O-mat”, if only to give this election the consideration it deserves.

The application has been developed by an independent editorial board in cooperation with the German Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (Federal Centre for Political Education) and the Dutch Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek, which developed the original application “Stemwijzer”. They do still offer a Stemwijzer for the Dutch EU elections, but it might be a little late for a change of heart there.

For everybody not voting in the Netherlands or in Germany, votematch.net offers the first Stemwijzer derived electoral helper-tool based on the European party system, not national lists - and it’s in English. One word of advice though - don’t be shocked if the result isn’t what you expect - should you expect something. The weighting seems a little arbitrary at times, despite the possibility to choose areas of importance in the end.

Interestingly, in the German case, answering “neutral” for all 30 questions leads to a recommendation to vote for the Social Democrats. And somehow I wasn’t even surprised…

If you want to travel from Britain to and from continental Europe with your own car, however, things have been rather different. Particularly on the short distance routes, i.e from South-East England to North-East France, competition has been patchy, despite there being two main ferry companies and the Eurotunnel train service.

For day-trippers, or those who want to spend only a weekend across the channel, things were pretty good, with the cost of taking a car for a day trip ranging from about 45 euros to 90 euros (or even cheaper if you got a special offer), and a weekend perhaps up to 150 euros, depending on duration of stay and season.

If however you wanted to spend more than three days suddenly things weren’t so good, particularly if you want to go in peak season. For example a trip from Dover to Calais on P&O, leaving July 4th and returning July 15th is around 375 euros. On the Eurotunnel it usually is even more expensive. Trips further afield are proportionately more expensive.

What’s even stranger is that these are fixed prices, dependent on length of stay and day of travel (and month). Often the ferries, and tunnel, would travel only half full, rather than reducing prices. The reasons for this have never been quite clear, though one is obviously Eurotunnel’s precarious debt situation is not conducive to a price war.

That’s why I am optimistic for the prospects for a new Danish company that started sailing across the channel last month, called Speed Ferries. This company hopes to bring budget-airline style travel to cross-channel ferries, with internet-only booking, prices that reflect supply & demand, and prices that do no depend on the length of stay. The trip is ’no frills’ with only a cafe (though you can pay more for a better lounge), but only last 55 minutes, and sales not to and from Calais to Dover, but Boulogne , which is a much nicer town.

Prices therefore, much like the budget airlines, can be bargains. For the dates I quoted above with P&O, Speedferries are offering a trip for 143 euros (83 euros out, 60 euros back), or less than half the ferry price.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste. Lots of people see the ferry trip, with duty-free shops, restaurants, etc as part of the holiday. Speedferries’ catamaran doesn’t have those. For your “booze-cruisers” (or the French equivalent) day-trips are not, usually, such good value, as there are no special offers. Therefore to go on a Saturday and come back the same day costs the same amount as to go on that Saturday and come back a week later. And of course the company has only been sailing for a few weeks and might encounter teething problems; its launch was delayed for months.

In the meantime though I’ve booked to go with a car on July 18th for 12 days for just 100 euros. I’ll tell you what it’s like. Or maybe some readers have already been?

This westernisation has not happened to Israeli Arabs because Israel encouraged them to abandon their traditional attitudes. If anything, it seems that the opposite has happened. Israel’s Bedouins still practice polygamy without any discouragement from the state. Significant portions of Israeli civil law are handled by religious and quasi-religious courts. Arab language schools in Israel do not seem to go out of their way to encourage a critical look at Arab or Israeli culture, or at least they don’t if this is to be believed. This transformation has happened despite living in a state where much of the population is openly hostile to Arabs, and where the state responds to their complaints with rhetoric more often than action.

Contrast this with Europe. In France certainly - and probably elsewhere - there is relatively little open hostility towards Arabs and Muslims by comparison to Israeli attitudes, although there is still plenty of hostility and a long history of egalitarin rhetoric in lieu of action. However, unlike in Israel, fairly large majorities of European-born Arabs identify strongly with Europe. Unlike in Israel, there is little to compare with the events of 1948 to sustain historical grievances. Even in Algeria - the closest example - France ulimately lost.

Yet in Europe, we expel imams for saying things that I suspect barely merit a second glace from Shin Bet. I suspect Israel worries far less about the mere incitement to murder than about actual guns and bombs, and I suspect they ignore the preaching of neanderthal sexual attitudes completely. Israel is far more genuinely threatened by its Muslim population than France is, and yet it has never felt the need to ban headscarves. I note little fear in Haaretz that Israeli Muslims are not modernising or adapting to global cultural norms. If anything, there seems to be a fear of the opposite - that an Arab community representing approximately as large a part of Israel’s population as francophones do of Canada’s population might make very modern demands for cultural equality.

I was watching a programme on BBC the other day about French Muslims who, despite considering themselves quite liberal and well integrated in France, greet the expulsion of imams and the new restrictions on conservative Muslims with trepidation. It leads me to wonder if in France, like in Israel, extremism is less of a problem than fear. Left to their own devices, freed from the entrenched political conservativism of Arab dictatorships but still the objects of suspicion and repression by a non-Arab state, Israel’s highly concentrated Arab population has become at least as liberal as many very successful states in the Far East and Latin America. Why then, is there so much fear that Europe’s small, dispersed Muslim population is failing to integrate?

Kaplan was head of a soi-disant ’Caliphate State’ in Cologne. In the eyes of German law, the ’state’ was a registered voluntary association, a Verein, like so many others in Germany (I belong to a couple myself, though so far as I can tell none is an Islamist extremist group.). To Kaplan, it was the government of God on earth; his followers numbered a couple of thousand, who paid taxes to their leader’s state. That state’s policy was pretty much what you’d expect: death to the infidel, drive the Jews into the sea, sharia all round, blah blah blah. Kaplan himself had spent several years as involuntary guest of the larger state surrounding his own, convicted of incitement to murder. After his release, Innenminister Otto Schily (who has come a long way from his days defending RAF members*) revoked the Verein’s status, declared it illegal and sought to ship the Caliph back to Turkey.

Kaplan fought hard against the expulsion order, not with the scimitar but with legal briefs. (A pragmatist, he shrewdly chose to engage a German lawyer rather than an imam.) Some of the evidence the Turks had amassed on him, it seems, had been extracted by measures one has come to associate with Abu Ghraib. The courts ruled such evidence could not ground extradition (Germany has taken this sort of thing seriously for the past half century). Lawyers rubbed their hands in glee as the appeals process began.

Wednesday evening, the Superior Administrative Court at Münster ruled that Kaplan could be extradited after all - but permitted a final appeal. When the authorities arrived at Kaplan’s flat (which is, amusingly, across the road from the Cologne offices of the Verfassungsschutz, the agency charged with monitoring extremists), they found that Kaplan had disappeared.

He could be anywhere. His lawyer claims he’s still in Cologne, and that he’ll swing by the police station voluntarily at some point, or maybe send a note from his doctor explaining why he can’t.

The German government has been left looking rather silly, and the Turks are fuming. But there’s more to all this than merely a story that is almost as amusing as it is alarming. Why on earth was Kaplan still free? Why hadn’t he been packed off to Turkey years ago?

The answer is that the present German legal system, for understandable reasons, has a lot of built-in safeguards, and that as a downside people like Kaplan have benefitted from a very long leash. Until quite recently, Islamist (and other) extremist groups enjoyed a good deal of immunity so long as they could characterise themselves as ’religious’ organisations. Schily fixed that shortly after the al Qaeda attacks in the USA. Still, Germany preserves a lot of procedural protections that some think no longer affordable since 11 September 2001.

The state is wrestling with itself on the issue. And it’s doing so in a serious way. John Ashcroft and David Blunkett may have a few Doppelgänger in Bavaria, but these, thankfully, are not in government. Extremists must not be permitted to turn the rule of law into a weapon against those who, unlike themselves, prize it. But nor must the state discard the rule of law when it proves inconvenient. I hope the authorities find Kaplan soon; I hope they succeed against Kaplan’s appeal and bundle him off shortly to the land of his fathers. But I am glad they have had to go by the book in trying to get rid of him.

* No, not the Royal Air Force, but the Rote Armee Fraktion, a terrorist group that developed out of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

You can read more about the disappearance of Kaplan at the Süddeutsche Zeitung; for the full background, follow the links. (Articles in German.)