Danes' Anti-Immigrant Backlash Marks Radical Shift
NPR ^ | 11/20/06 | sylvia poggioli

Morning Edition, November 20, 2006 ·
An anti-immigrant backlash, bordering on xenophobia, is sweeping across Europe. Sentiments once associated with ultra right-wing parties are becoming mainstream. Many taboos are being broken -- nowhere more starkly than in Denmark -- the erstwhile poster child of the welcoming and nurturing welfare state.
There are great winds of change rising in Europe and it seems week by weak they are becoming louder and more powerful.

Earlier this year, that haven of solidarity and liberalism was shaken by violent protests and deaths in the Muslim world over cartoons of Mohammed that were published in a Danish paper. Suddenly, Danes began to see their own Muslim immigrants as a threat to their national identity.

The cartoon crisis hit hard in the Copenhagen commune of Christiania, a bastion of the counterculture where freedom of speech is the paramount value.

Sculptor/welder Charlotte Steem, one of the commune's 800 residents, says the violence with which some Muslims reacted to the Mohammed cartoons has undermined many of her convictions.

"There are a lot of things I don't understand in [the] Muslim world," Steem says. She recognizes the free society of her country but says she doesn't know whether borders can remain open.

Only a few years ago, Denmark was proud of its open-door policy, and even the mildest critique of immigration would have been labeled racist.

But the mood shifted after Sept. 11, (False statement! Denmark and all of Europe reveled in September 11^th and at the time they declared uniformly that it was good becaue the US had been taken down a notch. Then when the Afghanistan began neither Denmark nor any of these other nations offered any support to the coalition and clamored and made motions and took votes against the US actions, A year later when the US went to war with Iraq these same nations blocked all efforts to helping the war effort and even blocked harder all our activities -- In truth it wasn’t till the summer of 2005 that things began to sour between the EU and their one time Middle Eastern Muslim friends, The end of all of this was the riots in France and the riots in Denmark, and riots in the Netherlands. This is when the winds began to change. and the terrorist attacks in Europe. After many years of leftist rule, a right-wing government came to power, introducing Europe's toughest immigration laws.

It also introduced restrictions aimed at curbing forced marriages among Muslims.

Today, the Danish political discourse is no longer stifled by political correctness. The tone can even be inflammatory. One politician has called for the internment of some Muslim radicals in Denmark for security reasons.

And last year, a radio station went so far as to call for the extermination of all radical Muslims.

The difficulty of integrating Muslims who don't share Western values is the No.1 topic of discussion.

Currently, the nation's best-selling book is called Islamists and Naivists.

"We compare Islamism to Nazism and communism because they are all three of them a totalitarian ideology," says Karen Jespersen, who co-wrote the book with her husband, Ralf Pittlekow.

Their politically incorrect analysis would suggest they're right-wingers. But they're diehard Social Democrats -- proud veterans of the student protests of the 1960s. What they have seen over the past two years year over in Denmark, France, and the Netherlands has liberal socialists terrified because they now know that the Muslims that they tried so hard for decades to cozy up to and curry their favor – are uncorruptible by wealth, immune to social engineering and unbribable by any offer sharing power with another nation or people –and that they want nothing except to kill and destroy all in the world that is not Islam. They seem also now to clearly understand that even if they do convert to Islam what awaits them is not the everlasting embrace of their new found brethren, but becoming a permanent second-class race that would serve as sex slaves and objects for torture and death at the whim and pleasure of their Muslim overlords, who bear four centuries of malignant seething hatred of all white Europeans .

Jespersen, a feminist and a former interior minister in charge of immigration issues, says the radicals' goal is the Islamization of Europe. When she was in government, many Muslims told her they were not free to adapt to Western society.

"In the parallel society, they use the term 'Muslim police,'" she says. "They are trying to control the more moderate Muslims. If they see their daughters talking to boys, then they go to the fathers and say, 'I saw your girl talking to a boy, and how can you let her? You have to stop it immediately.'"

The concept of the cradle-to-grave welfare state is so deeply embedded in the Danish psyche that even the conservatives don't dare touch it. But many Danes say their social pact has been undermined by the large inflow of immigrants -- many of whom don't share Danish civic values and, they say, prefer to live on the dole rather than work for the minimum wage. (As the Lord spoke here months and months ago These nations are already enslaved and paying and feeding their conqueror’s army as it grows and grows until it devours them.)

"A welfare state can only function if there are restrictions on the border," says Soren Espersen, a leading member of the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has had increasing electoral success running on an anti-immigration platform.

The government depends on the party's parliamentary support to pass bills.

Espersen points out that thanks to new laws, annual immigration has declined to 2,000 last year from 27,000 in 2001. Asylum for refugees has also dropped sharply.

Despite promoting Europe's harshest immigration law, the DPP rejects being identified with the racism and anti-Semitism associated with French ultra right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. It's radical Islam, Espersen says, that today represents the extreme right.

And the only way to combat it is through integration and education, he says.

Commentator David Trads says there is such a broad political consensus that the DPP has become mainstream.

"We want as few new immigrants as possible," Trads says. "This is new; this is not how it was five years ago."

One of parliament's most vocal opponents of Islamic radicals is Syrian-born Naser Khader, who says the integration debate is roiling among Muslims themselves.

Khader says many Muslims in Europe want to break their ties with their land of origin and declare their loyalty to their new Western homelands.

"But the Islamists don't like this," he says. "They want the mullahs and imams in Muslim countries [to] decide what the Muslims in Europe should do."

Khader insists that Islam and the West are not grappling with a clash of civilizations.

"It is clash between ideologies, democracy and not democracy," he says. "Between those who want democracy, modernity, respect for human rights, equality between gender, and the others who want the opposite."

Khader says it will be a long battle and won't be won during his lifetime.