Sajjad Karim (ECR). – Mr President, I am obliged to you for giving me the floor. It amazes me how we can be the best of parliaments and sometimes the worst of parliaments all in the same session. I have sat through this debate and listened to some of the most corrosive, divisive and cancerous language that I sometimes hear from time to time.

Equality is a cornerstone of the European Union. If we allow discrimination and its cancerous effects to take root, we are nothing. It particularly interests me that those colleagues here today who decided to speak about another one of our great religions in the way that they did actually share one thing in common, and that is a hatred for the European Union. They wish to cloak their arguments in Islamophobic rhetoric in order to attack Europe. That does not take us any further at all. As Europeans, we are equal. You attack one of us, on any basis whatsoever, and you attack as all.

(Applause)