Something’s Rugged in Denmark

If anyone thinks that Western Europe has not opened its eyes to the threat of militant Islam with the same degree of intensity that we ourselves have in America, they could chided and then forgiven – the question is less whether or not radical Islamists in Europe were recognized as problematical than what was to be done about them while still keeping true to foundational principals and western notions of justice.

Perhaps people who had thought so should only be lightly chided though: It seemed until lately that even Britain, our first partner in a military sense, had not quite come to grips with the Islamist viper it was nurturing to its bosom. Not that is, until after the subway attacks in London this summer ended the devil’s bargain under which the UK had allowed radical imams, often fugitives from “justice” in their native lands, to preach anti-western diatribes in urban mosques so long as the products of their passions were directed elsewhere, outside Britain. In France, large suburban areas (les zones sensibles, or “sensitive areas”) ringing the capital and other urban centers largely remain no-go areas to police and social workers, while non-assimiliating parallel societies also exist in Holland and Germany.

Where you stand on this issue depends of course on where you sit: Immigration is a social necessity for Europe, and integration can be difficult to force. Generous welfare programs make it rather easier for Western Europeans not to work than to do the necessary but unappealing maintenance tasks that first generation immigrant workers often take on gratefully. Too, the social democracies on the continent are not reproducing at a replacement rate – as more and more retirees leave the labor force, their benefits packages are being supported by fewer and fewer workers. In order to even have a prayer of maintaining the same level of services as native populations age the social democracies will require re-vitalization through immigration. Much of that immigration has come from Muslim regions like Turkey and Northern Africa, areas having social customs, mores and foundational philosophies often very much at odds with those they find in their new homes. These new people don’t always fit in – and many of them, coming as they do from deeply conservative societies and appalled by what they see as continental libertinism, don’t want to.

To maintain the social safety networks that have made life on the continent so pleasant, Europe has therefore been asked to swallow a rather greater degree of immigration without a concomitant degree of integration. This has come with significant social costs of which Europe is now keenly aware: As non-assimiliated second generation immigrants have grown into their adulthood, many of them take for granted the freedoms of the lands that gave their parents refuge, while simultaneously being acutely aware of social and income disparities as contrasted with the native population. These disparities, generated at least in part by the immigrant society’s lack of cultural assimilation, create an degree of unhealthy race- or origin-based envy which has caused some in the immigrant populations to respond to the siren’s song of religious radicalism. Radicalism offers simple, guilt-free solutions to a whole gamut complex personal issues. These combine in the proximate case with an opportunity to vengefully strike back at the perceived authors of the convert’s injustice – the Decadent West. Reports from the field say that something also there is about 72 virgins. For those thus easily swayed.

All of this is made very much worse by the fact that the host countries’ social safety nets keep immigrants from having to do much of anything about their straightened circumstances – those who are so inclined may be kept in funds just sufficient to ensure that they need not work at improving their lives, but not nearly sufficient to remain content – they form instead smoldering islands of resentment in a sea of native prosperity. These social pressures build upon themselves in a kind of reinforcing loop – in the end, the need of ostensibly egalitarian European democracies to support their comfortable ways of life threatens both that way of life itself and the underlying philosophy of egalitarianism. A dilemma.

Interesting to me is the rather direct way in which Denmark has chosen to approach the issue of non-assimilated minorities and radicalism. The queen herself used rather direct language to frame the issue last April:

(Q)uoted in a new authorised biography, (Queen Margrethe) said people had to take the “challenge” of Islam seriously.

“We have let this issue float around for too long, because we are tolerant and rather lazy,” she said.

The queen said Muslims should learn Danish properly, so they would not feel excluded from society.

In the book Margrethe, written by journalist Annelise Bistrup, the queen is quoted as voicing disapproval of “these people for whom religion is their entire life”.

Calling for opposition to radical Islam, she said: “We have to run the risk of being labelled in an unflattering way, because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.”

All that while unravelling what was apparently a terror cell with links to Bosnian extremists, taking a hard line with religious head gear, restricting the right of entry of extremist preachers and declining the proffered opportunity to pay blood money in the case of a night club shooting:

(I)mmigration minister (Rikke Hvilshoj) rejected the idea as “medieval”.

“Nor do we trade camels in Denmark”, was Mrs Hvilshoj’s response to the idea.

For which stance Mrs Hvilshoj apparently had her house firebombed.

Color it, “pushback.”

Denmark has a rather small immigrant community so the impact of policy here may not prove much of an example for the rest of Europe either way. Even so, when taken as a whole this seems like a pretty full swing of the pendulum away from the “sin of excessive tolerance” position, at least insofar as concerns Northern Europe. What remains to be seen is how much patience is left in these non-integrated societies for the “others” on both sides. It would be a shame if a continent but lately weaned from pogroms of one sort were to embark on a new wave of blanket oppression targeted at a different minority.

It would an even greater shame if the descendants of people who left their homelands in search of the personal liberties and economic freedoms available only in the west allowed a different sort of tyranny to grow unchallenged from within their own ranks, exchanging one set of masters for another.