Football “demigod” Johan Cruijff has Ajax bosses on the retreat in his rebel campaign to liberate Amsterdam club. The Dutch government says arming Libyan rebels is going a step too far. Plans to toughen Dutch immigration have already fallen foul of Brussels. Geert Wilders is back to playing “full volume on the organ” about Islam. And one in ten people in Amsterdam are “ghost citizens”.

Cruijff wins battle of Ajax
“Revolution” in the Netherlands, says AD. Football legend Johan Cruijff has won “the battle of Ajax”, as De Telegraaf puts it. Both the supervisory and management boards of Amsterdam team Ajax have surrendered, unable to fight off Cruijff’s advancing rebel forces. The boards' members have stepped down and the papers are full of battle and revolution talk – it must be habit.

Cruijff wants to rescue Ajax from mediocrity, and get the team back to playing his style of fast-paced, match-winning ‘total football’. And as the resigning Chairman Uri Coronel says, you just can’t stand up to a “demigod”.

Cruijff apparently hasn’t been afraid to use shock and awe tactics. “Uri Coronel painted an almost mafia-like picture of intimidation and impropriety by the ‘revolutionaries’ led by Johan Cruijff,” says de Volkskrant.
With his Ajax revolution, Cruijff has plans to take Ajax back to the top of European football. Not that he’s in any official position to do so – he’s just an ‘advisor’. And that’s the way he wants to keep it. In his words, “I don’t need a jacket on.”

Dutch to send in jets over Libya
“Target Gaddafi.” De Telegraaf has no doubts in its interpretation of UN resolution 1973. It heads its Libya stories with a posterised picture of the Colonel with a gun sight trained on his heart.

Unlike the popular Dutch daily, NATO isn’t so sure of itself. The member countries are divided on what to do next in Libya, says de Volkskrant. The US is happy to attack ground targets, and probably to arm the rebels too. Not so Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal – he says it would be “unwise”.

Nevertheless, the Netherlands is willing to start sending its F-16s in over Libyan territory. At the moment they’re just flying around the Mediterranean keeping an eye out for arms smugglers.

But Dutch MPs aren’t convinced at the cabinet’s plan. What exactly will the Dutch fighter jets be doing over Libya? They’re only armed for dogfights in the air – so what will they do if Gaddafi’s forces start firing at them from the ground?

Brussels wags finger at Dutch immigration plans
Brussels has given the Dutch government a yellow card for its toughening stance on immigration, de Volkskrant reports. Immigration Minister Geert Leers wants to make it a criminal offence to be in the country illegally. But that would be “a disproportionate measure”, according to EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström.

Euro MPs for the Dutch opposition parties were pleased at Brussels’ shot across the government’s bows. And it’s an unusual move, Trouw points out. “It will be very tricky for the government to make a bill that Brussels will allow,” concluded a Socialist Party MEP.

But the cabinet is sticking to its guns, and standing by its immigration minister, the paper says. After all, Germany, France and Britain all have similar laws criminalising illegal immigrants.

Wilders’ anti-Islam rant makes Christian Democrats squirm
“He was a paedophile, murderer, misogynist and rapist.” It’s the latest juicy quote from Geert Wilders’ on his least favourite prophet, Muhammad , AD reports.

For the Christian Democrat party it’s the nightmare scenario they worried about when they were searching their consciences about going into a coalition backed by the anti-Islam Freedom Party: Geert Wilders ‘full volume on the organ’.

During the coalition talks Mr Wilders seemed to be toning down the rhetoric to make life easier for the coalition parties. But in a letter to magazine HP/De Tijd this week, he’s apparently back to his old ways. Apart from being a sexually-obsessed rapist, Mohammed had a brain tumour that gave him delusions, Mr Wilders writes. “Unnecessary and tasteless,” say the Christian Democrats.

400,000 Dutch people missing
The Netherlands has 400,000 “ghost citizens”, de Volkskrant reports. They’re people who neither the government nor businesses know where to find. And because they’ve managed to vanish off the official radar, they avoid paying their bills. The tax service is losing out on millions of euros. Amsterdam leads the field when it comes to mystery inhabitants: the authorities apparently don’t know where to find around one in ten of the capital’s population.