Tag Archives: Copenhagen

Another Attempt to Murder Free Speech in Denmark

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larsalainby Soeren Kern:

“I live in a government safe house. I wear a bulletproof jacket. I have not walked the streets … in more than seven years. [I am] imprisoned in my own country for the mere fact that I have spoken out against the enemies of the West.” — Geert Wilders, MP, Netherlands

Lars Hedegaard, a well-known seventy-year-old free speech activist and critic of Islam, narrowly escaped a murder attempt on February 5 outside his home in Copenhagen, Denmark.

An unidentified assailant wielding a handgun fired a shot at Hedegaard, but fled on foot after the bullet missed its intended victim and the gun subsequently jammed.

According to Danish media, the gunman, in a postal service uniform, rang the doorbell of Hedegaard’s apartment building on the pretext of delivering a package. When Hedegaard opened the front door, the man pulled out a gun and fired a shot, narrowly missing Hedegaard’s head.

Danish police say they are searching for the suspect, whom they describe as “a man of a different ethnic background than Danish.” He is believed to be in his 20s and has a “Middle Eastern appearance.” Speculation is that the assailant is a Muslim because of critical statements that Hedegaard has made regarding Islam.

Hedegaard is the president of the Danish Free Press Society, a watchdog group that often warns that free speech is under threat from radical Islam. Hedegaard also co-edits a weekly online newspaper called Dispatch International, which covers stories in Danish, English and Swedish about a variety of topics, including content that is critical of radical Islam.

Hedegaard’s partner, Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist, says the attack was a brazen attempt to silence a courageous free-speech warrior, one who has not been afraid to challenge official myths about the impact of multiculturalism and Muslim mass immigration on European society.

As if to prove Carlqvist’s point, Danish officialdom has uniformly linked the attack on Hedegaard with the exercise of free speech in the country.

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a Social Democrat, said: “An attack on Lars Hedegaard is a heinous act which I condemn in the strongest terms. It is even worse if the attack is rooted in an attempt to prevent Lars Hedegaard to use his freedom of expression.”

Former Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who leads the center-right Liberal Party, said the attack was a “cowardly and cruel act.” He added: “If this action is rooted in preventing Lars Hedegaard from using his freedom of speech, we are witnessing an attack on all Danes.”

The former leader of the conservative Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard, who has long warned about the negative effects of multiculturalism and runaway immigration, said it is “un-Danish” if people cannot give their opinions without risking their lives. She added: “It is incomprehensible and shocking if the motive is political. If this is the case, it shows that it is dangerous to make use of our constitutional freedom of expression.

The leader of the left wing Socialist People’s Party, Annette Vilhelmsen, called the incident “totally unacceptable.” She said: “I probably do not agree with Lars Hedegaard on very much. But in Denmark we have freedom of speech. Political assassinations affect not just real people, they hit our democracy and our freedom of thinking.”

Hedegaard has been at the vanguard of a decade-long effort to fight back against restrictions to free speech in Europe, especially speech that is critical of Islam.

In April 2012, Hedegaard was acquitted by the Danish Supreme Court on charges of “hate speech” for comments he made about Islam.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

For complete coverage of the attempted assassination of Lars Hedegaard go to Gates of Vienna and International Civil Liberties Alliance

The Islamization of Copenhagen

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Bit by bit, it’s getting worse.

 

By Bruce Bawer

Bit by bit, it’s getting worse.

In recent years, life in the city of Copenhagen has hardly been free of, shall we say, problems related to Islam. But for the most part, the worst of it has been confined to Muslim neighborhoods such as Nørrebro. And residents of Copenhagen have at least been able to console themselves that conditions in their city were nowhere near as bad as those right across the Øresund Bridge in the now notorious Swedish burg of Malmö.

Well, as an editorial in Jyllands-Posten acknowledged last week, “conditions such as those in Malmö…are beginning to appear in Copenhagen.”

In a news story that appeared on the same day as the editorial, Jyllands-Posten reported the latest example of these “conditions”: both the Israeli ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community are now advising Jews in that city to stop wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David and speaking Hebrew loudly in public – even in neighborhoods that they think of as “safe.” Asked about this advice, Police Commissioner Lars-Christian Borg told Jyllands-Posten that Jews – and gays, too – should stay away from parts of the city where there is a recognized “risk of clashes and harassment.” (Nice euphemism for “Muslim neighborhoods,” that.)

The Jyllands-Posten editorial bleakly toted up other examples of what they described as the city’s increasing readiness to adapt to the ever-worsening situation in the Danish capital: Copenhagen’s Jewish school “looks like a small fortress,” supplied with an elaborate security system and police protection, a constant reminder to the children that there are people who wish to do them harm; the head of the Danish-Palestinian Friendship Society, who is also a leading figure in Denmark’s ruling Socialist People’s Party, recently opined that Hitler should have killed even more Jews than he did, and went unpunished and all but entirely uncriticized for it; Copenhagen’s mayor called on Jews not to display too many Israeli flags at a recent multicultural festival, an admonition that was generally regarded as sensible: “why pick unnecessary fights?” Why “provoke”? Once again proving itself to be morally head and shoulders above virtually every other major newspaper in Europe, Jyllands-Posten called on Danes to recognize just how dangerous it is to respond in a passive and accommodating way to Muslim hatred, and urged them to  stand up to it before it’s too late.

Read more at Front Page

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Report from the therapy room: Why are Muslims more violent and criminal?

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Jihad Watch:

This essay was originally published in 2011 in Dutch in the book De Islam – kritische essays over een politieke religie (Islam: Critical Essays about a Political Religion) by Wim and Sam van Rooy. Raymond Ibrahim, Hans Jansen, Michael Mannheimer, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or and others also contributed to the book.

It summarizes the main conclusions in my book Blandt kriminelle muslimer. En psykologs erfaringer fra Københavns Kommune (Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist’s Experiences from Copenhagen Municipality), and adds a few political arguments at the end. Publishers interested in publishing my Danish book in English or other languages are welcome to contact me at nicolaisennels@gmail.com.

Nicolai Sennels: Report from the therapy room: Why are Muslims more violent and criminal?

Nicolai Sennels (born 1976) is psychologist, a popular lecturer about Muslim integration and gangs, and author of “Among Criminal Muslims. A Psychologist’s Experiences from Copenhagen Municipality” (Free Press Society, 2009). This article summarizes his experiences and conclusions as a professional psychologist in the Copenhagen youth prison Sønderbro.

This article is an invitation to come behind the normally hermetically closed doors of the therapy room and get insights into the often just as closed Muslim culture and communities. As a psychologist in Copenhagen’s youth prison I had a unique chance to get insights into the culture and religion of Muslims and the causes for the violent behaviour and high crime rates among Muslim immigrants. My Muslim clients told me their stories from their families and communities, about life in their home countries, about their experiences with and views on non-Muslims and the Danish society. I had around 150 Muslim and 100 Danish clients on my couch. They all came from the same age group (12-17 years) and the two groups had on average the same social and economic background. Most of them were found guilty, but a large part also proved to be innocent. I thus had a very good opportunity to compare Muslims and non-Muslims psychologically.

The conclusion is that there are strong psychological differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is also clear that Muslim culture influences Muslims in a way that makes them more likely to become criminal and display anti-social behaviour – especially towards non-Muslims and non-Islamic authorities.

The crime rate among Muslims in the West is catastrophically high. Seven out of 10 inmates in Danish youth prisons have immigrant backgrounds, and almost all of them are raised in Muslim families. The first seven or eight places on the top-10 list of criminals’ nationality are occupied by immigrants from Muslim countries (Danes come in as number nine, followed by a long list of purely non-Muslim immigrants). This list is published by the Danish state’s Bureau of Statistics, and is corrected according to the criminals’ economic and educational status. The crime statistics also show that crime rates among immigrants get worse, not better, in subsequent generations. Time does not heal the problems, on the contrary. Second generation immigrants (born and raised in Denmark) in the age group 20-29 years are thus 76 percent more criminal than first generation immigrants (born outside Denmark) in the same age group. Second generation non-Western immigrants are five times more violent than Danes. 22 percent of the second generation immigrants between 20-29 years received one or more sentences in 2005 (http://avisen.dk/unge-efterkommere-er-de-mest-kriminelle_6193.aspx). In 2006 the number had risen to 23 percent (http://jp.dk/indland/krimi/article1371018.ece). The share of immigrants among youth criminals in Copenhagen rose from 56 percent in 2007 to 67 percent in 2008 – that is an increase of 20 percent in just one year (http://politiken.dk/indland/article560520.ece).

The question is of course: Why are Muslims so much more criminal, violent and seemingly non-empathetic than non-Muslims?

I conducted therapy with the Muslim and Danish inmates in both groups and individually: Individual therapy, Anger Management groups and Mindfulness training. During the hundreds of hours with both Danish (and a very small percentage of non-Muslim immigrants) and Muslim clients, a psychological profile of the Muslim culture became evident. We have to acknowledge the psychological differences between Muslims and Westerners if we want to understand the unsuccessful integration of Muslims in the West and its increasingly problematic consequences.

Anger vs. weakness

One very big difference between Muslims and Westerners concerns their views of anger. In our Western culture, anger is generally seen as a sign of weakness and lack of control and good style. Whoever experienced the embarrassment of expressing strong anger during, for example, family dinners or at work knows that it often takes time and a conscious effort to regain one’s lost respect. We in general see it as childish and immature if people use threats and aggressive behaviour to mark their dislikes and have things their way. Instead, we see peoples’ ability to use logical arguments, to compromise, to see the situation from our opponent’s side and their knowledge of the facts, and to remain calm when challenged as clear signs of strength and authenticity.

My Muslim clients saw these normal Western social tools for negotiation during social conflicts as signs of weakness. They saw the lack of readiness to use threats and engage in a physical fight as a sign of fear. I spent countless hours working with the inmates’ problematic relationship to violence. Most of the Danish clients knew that anger is a “bad feeling” and that in the end there is no excuse for using threats and violence when frustrated. This view was simply part of what they were raised to think by their parents and friends and the culture they were brought up in (though they did not always manage to follow that rule in their daily life).

Practising Anger Management therapy with Muslim clients does not just involve reminding them of good style and the benefits of handling conflicts and frustrations peacefully: The term “cultural conversion” would be the best expression. It turned out that my Muslim clients saw the use of aggression as an accepted and even often expected behaviour in conflicts. If a person does not become aggressive when criticised or insecure, it is seen as a sign of weakness and lack of ability to defend oneself and one’s honour. In Muslim culture it is expected that one is willing to sacrifice one’s personal safety to protect one’s group or whatever one represents. If a member of the group is not able to do so, there will immediately be sown doubts as to whether that member can be trusted as a useful defender of the family, ethnic group, religion, territory, etc.

The aggressiveness among Muslim men does not only show itself in the therapy room and crime statistics when comparing Muslim and non-Muslim offenders. In a recent study conducted by the Criminal Research Institute of Lower Saxony in Germany, scientists interviewed 45,000 teenagers of both Muslim and non-Muslim origin, and their conclusion was clear: “Boys growing up in religious Muslim families are more likely to be violent“.

These psychological insights should be used on a wider scale. One important example is that Western diplomacy and foreign policy must take such cultural differences into account. There is no doubt that when we meet extreme Islamic governments and organizations with suggestions of compromise and dialogue, the average Muslim voter on their streets expect their Islamic leaders to exploit such Western weaknesses to the maximum. We Westerners see aggressiveness in people and regimes as a sign of insecurity, and therefore meet such situations with soft compassion and respect. Such measures often work within our own cultural circles, but can have harmful long-term effects on our efforts to produce respect and maybe even a necessary amount of fear among hostile Muslim societies and organisations. This strategic psychological reminder concerns both big politics and when dealing with anti-social individuals raised in a Muslim setting.

Read more at Jihad Watch

Also see: Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences (New English Review)