The Gates of Vienna has a nice post on The Danish Model of dealing with Islam. GoV argues that:
The Danes are light-years ahead of the rest of the West when it comes to dealing with Islam, multiculturalism, mass immigration from the Third World, and all the other issues that generate PC plaque and clog the arteries of the body politic.
I’ve summarized and commented on his post below.
1. The Swedish model will fail
Everyone knows the “Swedish Model”: the perfect prototype of the Socialist state, the folkhemmet, the Home that everyone longs for, the all-encompassing cradle-to-grave
welfare system, the warm and inviting Scandinavian womb.But Sweden has morphed from a Utopia to a Dystopia in just two generations. It has become a soft totalitarian state in which dissent, rather than being silenced, is simply never voiced. The Swedish social fabric is disintegrating in the face of a sclerotic high-tax welfare state coupled with a flood of unassimilated third world immigrants, but the Swedes fastidiously avert their glance. In another generation Sweden is likely to join the ranks of failed states.
Wow, that’s some thick writing. I’ve discussed my lack of confidence in the European welfare states previously, but the point here is that the Danes are dealing with the problems, while the Swedes are not really worth emulating when it comes to dealing with the problem of Islam.
2. Government leadership (the Queen!) has spoken out firmly about the need for a limit to tolerance when it comes to radical Islamists.
Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II warned against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Denmark and the world in a new book out on Thursday, saying people must on occasion “show their opposition to Islam”.
“It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and very lazy,” she said in the authorized biography “Margrethe” written by journalist Annelise Bistrup. […]
“We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance,” she said.
“And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction,” added the queen, who has reigned since 1972 and celebrates her 65th birthday on Saturday.
Wise words – are we tolerant out of laziness or conviction? I think our government and culture needs a clearly articulated policy that warns radicals about the limits of our tolerance, the consequences of violating our values (prosecution, incarceration, deportation), and some expectations for integration.
3. Making entire families liable for honor killings.
The Danish system of jurisprudence now charges and convicts the entire family of anyone who commits an “honor killing”. The extended family of a wayward Muslim girl usually selects a teenage boy to carry out the deed, precisely because minors are treated relatively lightly by the
Danish courts. Now the boy’s father, mother, uncles, and brothers face hard prison time for his violent act. This revolutionary method is timely, effective, and appropriate — and hell will freeze over before the same practice is adopted in Britain or the United States.
I dunno, sounds good to me. I am glad that Denmark has the cojones to risk the rights of family members in order to protect the rights of these young girls who are victims of sick family belief systems.
4. Strict limits on immigration
The Danes have tightened immigration rules so that the flood of illiterate Muslims from the Middle East and Africa has been reduced to a trickle. Some Islamic radicals are being deported, and others are leaving voluntarily in order to escape the newly unfavorable climate in their adopted home. At the same time, the number of well-educated and
hard-working immigrants arriving in Denmark has increased — and, needless to say, most of these productive newcomers are not Muslims.
I’m not sure if the illiteracy of many (?) Muslim immigrants is part of the problem, and the author doesn’t really reference HOW the Danes are limiting immigration, but they are doing something to make Islamofascists unwelcome. Good.
5. Karen Jespersen, prominent tolerant liberal turned conservative
In the last couple of years she came under intense fire from the left-leaning faction of the Social Democrats for being a heartless hardliner, because she tried to stem the tide of the
very open immigration policy, and for trying to impose strict measures against criminal immigrants, earning her the nickname “Island-Karen”, because she suggested that criminal immigrants be isolated on an uninhabited island. […][In the end she realized:] that the Social Democrats could not be trusted to keep a strict immigration policy, despite their word to the contrary… So it came as no surprise that she left first the parliament, and then finally in October 2006, resigned from the party, having abandoned all hope that the Social Democrats could be trusted on the immigration issue should they regain power after the next election. Today it was announced that she has joined Venstre [the conservative government party]
As a rough equivalent, imagine that Nancy Pelosi
spoke out against radical Islam and open borders, quit the Democrats, joined the Republicans, and announced her support of George W. Bush. Yes, I know. It burns out all your cyber-circuits when you try to think about it, doesn’t it? It definitely can’t happen here.
In the end, when it comes to the point where we need to ACT legislatively, will the libs have the cojones to limit their tolerance reasonably, and act with a firm hand, esp. on immigration? Will they give in to CAIR’s arguments of religious persecution and victimization, or will many Dems have to leave their party, on this issue or entirely, when they see the light on the real threat of Islam? Unknown.
6. Islamists and Naivists?
“Islamists and Naivists,” [the book] by Karen Jespersen
and Ralf Pittelkow, …is causing a sensation in Denmark — in part because the authors are establishment figures previously known for their progressive attitudes toward Islam and integration. […]The book’s main argument is that Europeans who ignore the threat posed by Islamists belong to a new and dangerous tribe of “naivists,” a term coined by the authors. This may not sound so radical at a time when the pope has upset the Islamic world by quoting a medieval passage calling Islam
“evil and inhuman” and when Islamic terrorist plots have put Europe on edge.But the book also equates Islamic fundamentalists with
Nazis and Communists — a provocative stand on the heels of the cartoon crisis, which strengthened a backlash against immigrants that was already brewing here.
7. Even the Socialists in Denmark are not shying away from warning against Islamism.
While even American conservatives are recanting on the use of “Islamofascist,” in Denmark, the Socialists are unabashed in declaring Islamists a danger.
Pittelkow says that Denmark’s cherished openness is under attack by Islamists due to a clash of values epitomized by the cartoons. He argues that Islamic radicalism nearly triumphed during the crisis because many editors and
political figures in Denmark and elsewhere accepted Islamic arguments that publishing the caricatures was an affront to Islam, turning their backs on free speech.“The threat is that the Islamists and their values are gaining ground in Europe, especially among the younger generation,” [Pittelkow] said in an interview. “They try to interfere in people’s lives, telling them what to wear, what to eat, what to think and what to believe. They warn Muslims to create their own societies within Europe or risk disappearing like salt in water.”
Muslimleaders here have denounced the book, accusing Pittelkow and Jespersen of giving Muslim-bashing a respectable face in Denmark, a country that views itself as a tolerant and open society.
“The mixture of political correctness and
fear all too often leads to compliance with Islamism,” Pittelkow writes in the book. “The fatal mistake of the naivists was to cave into demands for Islamic-style censorship.”
8. Multicultural capitulation to Islam has gone too far – bridging left and right by moving center
All across the rest of Europe governments are caving in and engaging in PC self-censorship to appease their angry imams. But not in Denmark.
“Denmark and the rest of Europe need to integrate their existing Muslim communities,” Pittelkow said. Multiculturalism has gone too far.”
The Danes have successfully bridged the gap between Left and Right on the issue of Islam. They’re by no means unanimous, but a general agreement is developing across the broad center of Danish society about what needs to be done.
Again, this is being accomplished by former liberals being mugged by the reality of Islam, and forsaking the dream that the problem is just a few radicals. Conservatives could also stand to move to the middle a little, encouraging moderate Islam, though this is hard when you believe that such an Islam is really not being true to the hateful life and writings of Mohammed.
9. Will it happen in Britain and the US? Doubtful.
The Danish model is a simple one; it’s not hard to understand. Yet no other Western country seems to be anywhere close to adopting it. Why?
The Danes are a lot like Americans or Britons. They are open-minded, tolerant, and revere freedom of speech.
They value the rule of law and cherish their traditional institutions.Above all, they have a great sense of humor.
Yet we’re more likely to re-establish public flogging than we are to take up the Danish model.
I think there are few things in American and British culture which will keep us from taking steps against Islamic fundamentalism (is there really any other kind?), chief of which are
- The left’s inability to discriminate between fundamental Islam and fundmentalist Christianity
- The atheist-secular influence which rejects all vital religion, and you have an impasse which causes us to not unite against Islamic insanity.
- The inability of leftists in balancing the idea that some spiritual claims must be seen as potentially true (specifically, Christianity, like many of our forefathers did) and providing for true freedom of religion (not the gross anti-religionist view of separation). Since they lack this conviction or an effective spiritual epistemology, they reject all religions, and that limits their ability to rightly and surely reject many of the claims of Islamic autonomy and self-rule.
I am trying not to pin our entire inability to deal rightly with Islam on the liberals, but most of it does rest there. However, I do think that we can agree that any system that denies accepted human rights (due process, not beating your wife or kids, polygamy, etc.) should be scrutinized. But how to deal with honor killings? Can we hold the entire family responsible? The Danes think so. I doubt the ACLU would let that through without a fight.
Islam is a serious threat to society and civilization. We probably won’t take drastic measures until it is too late. The Danes are, however, on the forefront of trying to deal with the Islamic (not just Islamofascist) putrefaction of society and civil liberties. But as I stated in Dealing with Islam: Passive or Active Resistance?, what we really need, in addition to legislation, is a spiritual awakening of Christian truth – how else can we be rescued from demonic ideologies like Islam?