As police moved in on the neighborhood, the media coverage was suffused with military metaphors about “pincer movements” while reporters dutifully parroted the government’s line. Young men in the area described journalists going past to snap a quick photo and then driving on without stopping “as if we were in a zoo.”22
Media accounts often use the shorthand “of foreign background” to describe criminals. When a white Danish man named Rasmus was found guilty of a murder in the centre of Copenhagen’s tourist district, the press incredulously described him as “not the typical image of a killer” and “not looking like a cold-blooded murderer.” Indeed, he “came from good circumstances and went to a top private school.”
The fact is that, in Denmark, those who look like twenty-year-old Rasmus usually walk free while people named Omar or Abas regularly get targeted for searches. Yet there has been a major debate in parliament as to whether young men who are not yet citizens but who have little connection to their parents’ homeland can be expelled as a measure to prevent crime. That’s because, Soei argues, “Middle Eastern ethnicity and violent crime are two phenomena that have become linked together in the media.”23
First-generation women have done better, with many finding jobs in the service sector, but their brothers are suffering in a job market where stereotypically unskilled male jobs have largely disappeared. For those without education, unemployment is around 40 percent. As Soei argues, “unskilled men risk ending up at the bottom of society with lesser opportunities for creating a good life for themselves and winning recognition from their fellow citizens.”24
Although the situation has improved somewhat in the last decade, there has been a corresponding spike in perceptions of discrimination, and not just among angry young men. On the contrary, Soei contends, “it is the best-educated citizens of immigrant background that feel themselves most discriminated against in Danish society”—people who feel that they “have earned the right to be recognized as fully equal citizens” but are still treated as outsiders.25
One of the key figures in charge of responding to security threats at the time of the 2008 riots was the Danish spy chief Jakob Scharf. Denmark has, like France and Belgium, also had its intelligence failures. Before the attack that killed a guard outside Copenhagen’s synagogue in February 2015, the Danish intelligence agency had contacted the prisons to ask about potential radicalization. According to Scharf, who led the agency from 2007 to 2013, one of the lapses occurred because the prisons didn’t take warnings seriously, setting aside the reports they had received.
There’s always a risk, he says, that when sifting through massive amounts of information, analysts will miss something. Quickly evolving technology also presents a challenge that makes it difficult for intelligence agencies to keep up. Nor does having people in the right place always prevent an attack. When the attacker struck at the Copenhagen synagogue, there were armed police present, and he still managed to shoot someone. Since then there have been armed police outside Jewish community buildings 24–7. “That’s an extremely expensive way to create security. Does it change anything?” he asks. If the same attacker, deterred by police, decides to attack the shopping mall across the street, has the security actually helped?
For Scharf, the more important battleground is in the neighborhoods where young men susceptible to radicalization live. Some communities have been successful in rooting out terrorist elements; others have not. The key is a strong and secure sense of belonging. “If we want to mobilize local communities … we need to make sure that they do see themselves as being part of society in general and not being someone in opposition to the rest of society.” And the tenor of the current debate in Denmark is doing the opposite. As in Holland, the default national identity is still seen as synonymous with being white and ethnically Danish.
Scharf has mixed feelings about Denmark’s fierce debate. “On one hand, the debate lets off some steam” because those on the far right don’t “feel the need to resort to violence,” as they might in a more restricted society, he argues matter-of-factly, as someone who has dealt with threats from neo-Nazis as well as Islamic fundamentalists. “In other countries, they feel they can’t talk about it at all,” which sometimes leads to far-right militancy as exemplified by the Norwegian killer Breivik’s massacre. Scharf is not against the give-and-take of politics, but he objects to “the way of communicating” that has come to characterize Danish debates on immigration.26
Echoing Soei and some of his angry young sources, Scharf argues that the prevalent message in media and online is: if you’re Muslim, you’re not really part of this society.
The DPP’s deputy leader, Søren Espersen, is having none of it. He completely rejects the argument that the tone of political debate and his own party’s campaigns might drive extremism. If that were the case, argues Espersen, “there wouldn’t be any of them in Pakistan, would there? Or Afghanistan or Yemen or Saudi Arabia. This has got nothing to do with what we do or say or the tone or anything, or bad integration,” he insists. “It is simply these taught religious ways that make this possible. And it is the same all over, whether you put money into integration or you don’t.”
The Scandinavian nations, he argues, have invested more than anyone in integration, mentioning consultants and police-community dialogue groups. “It made no difference. The situation is the same in France, in Germany, in Austria and wherever.” He doesn’t seem concerned that money and effort may have been invested in bad ideas or the wrong programs.
Espersen also has no interest in the American melting pot model and British-style multiculturalism, arguing that enclaves, whether in Brooklyn or Bradford, are a disaster. “In America, you shut your eyes and don’t want to hear about it. Take Jewish Williamsburg. They live their own life. Everything is within these borders. They go to work and come out and work here, and then go back again. Nobody knows what’s happening,” he argues. Christianity isn’t immune, he concedes. Some fundamentalist groups in America are “absolutely mad” and no one pays attention “until they start killing each other.”
He doesn’t want “parallel states” in Denmark and he blames Muslim communities for failing to tackle the extremism in their midst. Instead, he complains, it’s Christians who end up leading the fight. “They don’t do a thing. Maybe out of fear,” he adds.
As Espersen sees it, you must “publicly announce that you put the Danish constitution over your religious laws.” And if that means taking kippas away from Jews or turbans from Sikhs in public buildings, so be it. “If that’s the law of the land, then you abide. It works in France, and I think it’s a good idea.” He thinks it will help young Muslim women become free. The veil is anathema to Danish values, he believes. “To those young girls, especially in the Muslim society, it is a pressure. I see them with head scarves all the way down to five- or six-year-old girls.” Here his feminist streak emerges, and it becomes clear how appealing the DPP’s rhetoric could be for a traditional European feminist who deplores religious oppression of women. “Some of the best Muslim girls are very, very clever. They go in and take the highest educations and become doctors and lawyers and have high degrees and then they get married to their cousin and just stay home and make babies,” Espersen laments.27
What he misses is that counterterrorism requires allies, and if those potential allies are angry and alienated or feel scapegoated by the larger society, they may be discouraged from helping. A paper published by Scharf’s company, CERTA, and the foundation TrygFonden concluded that local communities, including moderate imams, are vital in fighting extremism and that feelings of marginalization can be manipulated to fuel radicalization.28
The findings focus on building strong, resilient communities that can detect and root out extremists. But the solution has a great deal to do with inclusion and a sense of belonging and investment in the larger society.
“One of the strongest identities we have in Western countries as individuals will be through the work we
do,” says Scharf. If asylum-seekers, or young men of immigrant background, are excluded from work life, how do they form a Danish identity? “I think that is the basic problem,” he adds.29 “Where do they belong?” For the unemployed, religious extremist groups provide a strong, ready-made identity and a sense of camaraderie and belonging.
When a community is invested in the larger society and feels part of it, rather than a ghetto apart, locals can often be far more effective intelligence gatherers than any law enforcement agency. He mentions a network of Somali women in Funen, an island in central Denmark, where there have been problems with radicalization and extremism. These mothers are much more effective, he says, than the police’s anti-radicalization unit. “Instead of putting the ghetto label on a certain area,” he says, they should be asking, “Where are the resources? What kind of local interests can we support?”
He believes the model could be hugely helpful in parts of France and Belgium. Instead of hoping that problems “will remain in these areas and will not slip into the rest of society,” says Scharf, they should be engaging locals who “could be calling the parents, talking to neighbours, saying, ‘Do you know what is going on?’” But making those communities feel they have a stake in society is a prerequisite to getting their cooperation.
In France and Belgium, the sense of exclusion is arguably even stronger. There are many young second- or third-generation immigrants who live on society’s margins. Because of France’s rigid secularism it is easier for radical groups to point to perceived injustices and recruit disillusioned young men. Pointing to the prohibition against veils in public schools is an easy way to inflame an already angry young person. In Britain, a country where police officers are permitted to wear turbans and no one stops a woman in full niqab walking down the street, the pitch must be different. It’s harder to point to something in the UK that explicitly targets Muslims, Scharf says, so recruiters choose another injustice—blaming Britain for military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It’s not just Muslims, he says; there are potential future Breiviks among the right- and left-wing extremists, too. What interests him is who are these people becoming radicalized? What are the catalyzing issues? What makes radicalization succeed, and what is the process that draws them to extremism? Their profiles are quite similar; the reason that young Muslims are especially vulnerable these days is that they are the newest minority and Danish identity has not done much to embrace them, Scharf argues.
“Immigration is still something which is new to us,” he says. “We have to understand that this is also about making sure that people who come from different cultures, people who come from other countries … should be able to identify themselves as Danish when they actually live here.” Instead, the majority continues to do things, he insists, that send the message, “You might be born in Denmark, you might be raised and you’ve been educated, you’ve been working in Denmark, but you are still not really Danish.”30
It’s not a huge surprise, then, that a seven-year-old girl recently approached the Danish-Turkish MP Yildiz Akdogan on the street near her home in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro neighborhood and asked, “So, are you a Muslim, too?”
Akdogan smiled at her and said, “I’m from Nørrebro, just like you.”
And the girl insisted, “But you are a Muslim, right?”
It made Akdogan cringe.
“It’s because everyone is asking her, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ or everyone is addressing her like that. She’s not going to answer you if you ask her, ‘Where do you come from?’ She will not say, ‘I am from Nørrebro. I’m a Dane.’ She will say, ‘I’m a Muslim.’” This doesn’t help create a sense of Danish pride among minorities. By focusing on identities that exclude people, she insists, “We are not contributing to the integration process.”31
The latest iteration is a campaign in city councils to serve pork to children in kindergarten classes. The only reason to push for public pork provision, as Scharf puts it bluntly, is to tell people, “If you are Muslim, you are not really a Dane.” Jews may feel offended or excluded, too, but, Scharf argues, they have a longer history of being a minority group and hence have more experience with such forms of subtle social exclusion. “I think Jews are much more used to the fact that they are confronted with these kinds of issues, and they have to work out their own solutions, they will have their own kindergartens, they will have their own schools.”32
The sociologist Aydin Soei is sceptical about words themselves doing damage or leading to radicalization, but he too has been mistaken as a foreigner at home and as a native abroad. “It doesn’t have to do with the tone itself, but it has to do with when people who have been born here or lived here their entire lives are talked about as if they were aliens in society, as if they are not Danish. So we have a problem with the narrative that you are only Danish if you are white,” argues Soei. He was shocked, for instance, while living in New York, to be seen as white. “I lived in the Upper West Side and went for a walk in Harlem,” he recalls. “The police stopped a black couple, and I just walked by. The black woman pointed at me and said, ‘Why don’t you stop that white guy over there?’” Soei, who has a distinctly Middle Eastern complexion and appearance, looked around wondering where the white guy was, until he realized that she meant him. It was the first time in his life he’d been considered white.33
Another driving force behind the resentment of these angry young men is employment discrimination and lack of access to basic amenities of social life. Rather than submitting a CV with an address in one of Copenhagen’s immigrant areas, many Muslim men fake it to give themselves a chance for an interview. Many of Copenhagen’s nightclubs have quotas, according to bouncers, limiting the number of entries to twenty or so young men with immigrant backgrounds. Those who show up later in the evening get rejected. Soei has felt the sting himself.
Many of the young people from Nørrebro feel that their complaints disappear into a hole in the public debate and that they are not taken seriously in the same way that other citizens would be. They argue that the police have a monopoly on defining reality in media coverage of the riots. As several young men wrote in an op-ed after the riots, they just wanted to be treated like any other Danes by politicians and the media, rather than being sidelined or discriminated against “because of our names or skin colour which still describe us as immigrants despite the fact that we were born here in this country.”34
For Soei, the greatest paradox of the riots is that they are “likely to jeopardize the possibilities for young people to be perceived as citizens worthy of recognition in Danish society, while it is precisely this lack of recognition as morally accountable fellow citizens, that these youths so urgently seek.”35
Espersen is dismissive of the complaints he hears from minorities and waves off claims of employment discrimination and other barriers. “There have been some young Muslims that have said to me, ‘What about us? What can we do?’ I say everything is open for you. If you think you live in a ghetto, move to Jutland, and you can have a house there. If you want to have an education, go and get one. What is all the complaining about?” he asks. “Denmark is one of the best societies in the world. Every option is open. You can go to university without paying. You get your books paid. You get a study loan. You get an allowance and everything. Everything is free. The world is yours.”36
The French philosopher Pascal Bruckner generally agrees with the ideas of Espersen and others on the right when it comes to culture wars; he is best known for his scathing criticism of the left’s apologetics for third-world dictators. Anyone who seeks to “excuse the atrocities of new nations by citing colonialism, imperialism, American influence, or whatever, is to start from an outrageous falsehood,” he wrote. Rather than promoting justice, they are helping newly independent nations “revert to forms of despotism that democratic tradition has already confronted and conquered,” Bruckner argued in his incendiary book Tears of the White Man.37
But unlike Espersen
, who is quick to dismiss all grievances, Bruckner is clear-eyed about the discrimination and anger among the children of immigrants today, something that most on the right dismiss as whining. Like Soei, Bruckner has seen firsthand the exclusion that was creating a counteridentity among the young French of the banlieues born to immigrant parents and not fully accepted as citizens. And like the angry young men in Denmark, he sees it happening in Paris.
“Born French they now want to become French, but they feel themselves impeded by an invisible screen behind which they see their compatriots succeeding, working, and amusing themselves without inviting them to join the party. The colour of their skin, and especially their social origin and their address constitute an insurmountable barrier,” he wrote. For him, it was a negative form of integration. “France humiliated their parents and now ignores them, and their rage can also be interpreted as a cry of disappointed love, a way of saying: we’re here, we exist.”38
Despite their relative success in education and work, compared to their brothers, Muslim women in Europe face their own dilemmas. Akdogan, the MP, recalls a recent talk she gave at a local school where many of the students were religious young Muslims. They asked Akdogan, in Danish, “What does it take for us to become Danes?” She looked at them quizzically and told them they already were and tried to convince them that their religious identity didn’t define them. “All of them are born and raised in Denmark; they don’t even speak their mother tongue,” she told me, “and still, they don’t see themselves as Danes.”39
Messages that make minorities doubt their Danishness are frequent and sometimes come from top government officials, not just politically incorrect tabloids. In 2016, the prickly conservative former immigration minister Bertel Haarder asserted that Danishness meant acceptance of gender equality, freedom of speech, hard work, and riding a bike, among other things, prompting a Danish-Iraqi writer who grew up in Syria to pen an op-ed letting him know that she had learned to ride her bike in Damascus, while a Danish-Pakistani reminded the minister that in addition to cycling to school every day for years in a working-class Copenhagen suburb, he had been raised by a hardworking mother.40
Go Back to Where You Came From Page 9