Posted on 04/05/2002 4:34:53 PM PST by Map Kernow
ON first impressions the ideal of "multi-culturalism" was thriving in central Copenhagen this week. At the Norre Alle ethnic minority community centre a small group of middle-aged, fair-skinned Danish ladies linked arms with immigrant friends and danced to a rusty recording of Greek folk music.
In the rapidly-filling hall men born in Somalia, Gambia, Jordan, Algeria and Turkey chatted over cups of subsidised coffee. This, after all, is Denmark, Europe's shining light of liberal values, as famous for its "open door" policy towards asylum seekers and refugees as it is for being first to legalise gay marriages and hard-core pornography.
At least "liberal" was how Denmark used to be described. Now, according to Bashy Quraishy, the Pakistan-born president of the European Network Against Racism who has lived in Demark for 32 years, the beacon of tolerance has turned "racist".
Since September 11 everything has changed, he says. "Since then we have seen that Danes are as racist as anybody."
The real reason why the centre was packed on Wednesday night was that Copenhagen's large immigrant community had summoned a crisis meeting.
The topic was a controversial law on immigration that is now passing through parliament with the backing of 60 per cent of the Danish people. The legislation, introduced by the new centre-Right government that won power last November, will be on the statute book by mid-summer.
Its aim is to do something very "unDanish" - shut down national borders to more foreigners and slash their welfare payments, in some cases by over 30 per cent.
Requirements for asylum are being tightened, funding to ethnic minority organisations withdrawn, the waiting period for permanent residency extended from three to seven years, rights to family reunion curtailed, and rules put in place banning marriage by Danes to foreigners until the age of 24.
The laws - justified by the government on the grounds that Denmark has been too liberal and generous for too long - are causing inevitable resentment and confusion among its 300,000-strong immigrant community, 70 per cent of whom are Muslims.
"This is our home," said Ousman Sawaneh, a Somali with Danish citizenship. "But they are doing their level best to get us out."
Voices on the Danish Left are outraged by what they believe is a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that has spun out of control, but they are outnumbered. "People still have a perception that Denmark is a country that respects human rights," said Kamal Qureshi, an MP from the Socialist People's Party. "It is simply incredible that the international community has not noticed what is going on. Here in Denmark we are passing extreme legislation that Jorg Haider [Austria's far-Right populist] couldn't even dream of."
Mr Quraishy says the terrorist attacks on America last September changed the entire political debate. In one fell swoop the rhetoric about immigrants and immigration changed.
"It was like a fuse," he said. "Much of the racist feeling was always there beneath the surface in the land of Vikings. But September 11 set it off. The whole atmosphere has been poisoned."
Memories are fresh of how the Right-wing populist People's Party, under its blonde leader Pia Kjaersgaard, campaigned with a poster showing a Danish girl next to a slogan saying: "When she retires Denmark will have a Muslim majority." It doubled its vote to 12 per cent.
The party's deputy chairman, Peter Skaarup, told The Telegraph that it was right to link immigration directly to crime. "It is very hard not to do so," he said. "Three quarters of rapes are carried out by non-Danes . . . We want to preserve Denmark as a non-immigrant country."
What is now beginning to worry immigrants' organisations, and some Left-of-centre European governments, is that what is happening in Denmark is occurring elsewhere. The success of the People's Party is mirrored by the rise of similar parties in Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Austria has had Mr Haider for many years.
Last month, the liberal world of Dutch politics was turned upside down when a shaven-headed homosexual, Pim Fortuyn, who has described Islam as a "backward culture" and has called for an end to all immigration and asylum in his country, won 35 per cent of the votes in Rotterdam for his Livable Netherlands party.
Almost half of 18 to 30-year-old Dutch people now say they want zero Muslim immigration and that they will vote for Mr Fortuyn in May's general election.
In Hamburg, Germany, where some of the September 11 hijackers lived, the Party for a Law and Order Offensive run by Judge Ronald Schill won more than 20 per cent of the vote in local elections.
Judge Schill has said he wants to deport "black African drug dealers and the knife-stabbing Turks".
In Italy, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's government is tightening up rules to penalise illegal immigrants. A new centre-Right Portuguese government came into power last month.
However, it is not only on the Right that the rhetoric about immigration is changing. Last weekend, the grand old man of European Social Democracy, the former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, caused astonishment by saying that Germany - which has seven million immigrants - had invited far too many foreigners in after 1945.
This was a great mistake, he believed, because Germans were and still are instinctively racist and do not want to assimilate other cultures. "Now we find ourselves in a multi-cultural society and cannot cope with it. We Germans are unable to assimilate all seven million. The Germans do not want this. They are to a large extent xenophobic." Suddenly it had become acceptable to question multi-culturalism from the Left.
At the end of June Denmark takes on the European Union presidency and there are signs that this will spur the whole issue of immigration and asylum to be debated anew. Yesterday the governments of France, Belgium and Sweden called for talks on the issue with Copenhagen.
Mr Quraishy says the time has come for the EU to decide a policy for its 20 million immigrants. "Europe has got to come to terms with the fact that it is not all white and Christian. It has to look at itself and ask what it wants because there is no going back."
America knows about this issue first-hand.
Funny, but not at all unexpected or even remarked in today's world. But it does give an interesting perspective to Mr. Quraishy's claim in the last paragraph of the above article that "there is no going back." There certainly seems to be an aggressive will on the part of many black African leaders to go back to the "good old days," doesn't there?
Recall that they are one of the few countries besides the US and Britain to have suffered casualties in Enduring Freedom and in WWII they told the Nazis to f*ck off when they came for the Danish Jews. Unlike, say, the French.
The Danes have always been hard headed and clear-sighted. When they can see at all, that is; they have the highest rate of alcoholism in the world.
:-)
They smoke a lot, too. And have lots of all kinds of sex. And now racism---obviously they're very, very bad people. (:-)
Immigration policy
Denmark is not a country open for immigration, and the DF will not accept that Denmark develops into a multi-ethnic society. We therefore demand a revision of all laws regarding immigration and foreign policy since the implementation of the Immigration Law in 1983. We also demand the Integration Law abolished. Denmark cannot accommodate the whole world. The free access to Denmark undermines our welfare. We do not wish for the Danish people to become a minority in their own country. Refugees should be sent home as soon as it is possible. Criminal immigrants should be deported immediately after served sentence. The right of family reunification should be abolished, and the mass allocation of Danish citizenship should come to an end.
Denmark cannot accommodate the whole world. But we, the United States, can?
We do not wish for the Danish people to become a minority in their own country. But here in the United States, the ethnic, religious, and racial make-up can be altered at random or at the will of our political elites or giant corporations?
Thank you for bringing this article.
The political debate did not happen overnight, it's been in the works for years, trouble was....... nobody was listening, the left was too loud.
They do.?????
Who knows, 50 years from now young European FReepers may well be complaining about socialist America.
The Left is very, very well aware of the jolt September 11 provided--that's why (among other things) for six months now we've been exposed to the Ad Council's "I Am An American" ad campaign, with the most motley crew of outlandish looking people staring into the camera and growling "I AM AN AMERICAN!!!" against an urgent ostinato of an endlessly repeated, super loud guitar riff, which seems to say "Listen and Believe!!"
The whole point of the spot is to try to stop people post 9/11 from asking "Who is an American--a person who wants a high standard of living and job and government benefits, or a person who is loyal to this country, its ideals, its system of government, its way of life?"
Having a certain "look" or skin color, or coming from some exotic place on the globe originally, or worshipping some strange god doesn't make you an "American," people are discovering to the consternation of the Left---believing in American values and acting according to them does.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.