Posted on 11/11/2009 6:10:02 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
COPENHAGEN — Paris has its grand mosque, along the Seine. So does Rome, the city of the pope. Yet despite a sizable Muslim population, this Danish city has nothing but the occasional tiny storefront Muslim place of worship.
The city, Denmark’s capital, is now inching toward construction of not one, but two grand mosques. In August, the city council approved the construction of a Shiite Muslim mosque, replete with two 104-foot-tall minarets, in an industrial quarter on the site of a former factory. Plans are also afoot for a Sunni mosque. But it has been a long and complicated process, tangled up in local politics and the publication four years ago of cartoons mocking Islam.
The difficulties reflect the tortuous path Denmark has taken in dealing with its immigrants, most of whom are Muslim. Copenhagen in particular has been racked by gang wars, with shootouts and killings in recent months between groups of Hells Angels and immigrant bands.
The turmoil has fed the popularity of an anti-immigrant conservative party, the Danish People’s Party. In city elections scheduled for Nov. 17, the People’s Party, by some estimates, could double the roughly 6 percent of the vote it took in the last municipal election.
Denmark is not alone in grappling with the question. In Italy, the rightist Northern League opposes mosques in Italian cities; in Switzerland, voters will go to the polls on Nov. 29 in a referendum to decide whether to ban the construction of minarets.
In Denmark, it was the cartoons, one of which depicted Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, that gave the initial impetus to a movement for a mosque.
“I wrote a front-page story saying we somehow had to reconnect to the Muslims, to collect money
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
History will judge just how bad a mistake it was to allow virtually unlimited immigration of these death cult members to European countries. They are a cancer on a society.
The only real question for Denmark (and other Western European nations) is how bloody do they want the upcoming civil war to be. They can wait, as the enemy strengthens, or they can bring the fight to them sooner, before their numbers, equipment, and training make it a close fight.
It’s all up to them.
Fair is fair -- an idea which evidently is opaque to a significant number of Muslims.
The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, the believers our soldiers.
Rome is not the city of the pope, as this article claims in its opening sentences. Shows you how much editors know at the NYT.
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