Ever since the first immigrants from the Middle East were issued with Danish passports at the end of the previous century, a discussion has periodically raged about what conditions must be fulfilled before an immigrant can be regarded as Danish.
It has always been a painful and contentious debate, because Islam is equipped with a professionally low threshold for offence, which the media have adopted. No reasonable people would think of criticising Muslims for their religion, which consists of the confession of faith, daily prayers, fasting, almsgiving to the poor and a pilgrimage to Mecca. The core of the dispute has always been the Islamic ideology, which is a sacred, total submission to the Islamic political and ideological doctrine that demands a totalitarian caliphate governed according to sharia law, as set out in Islam’s three “testaments”: the Qur’an, the Hadith (the traditions) and the Sira (the biography of the Prophet Muhammad).
If debaters criticise Islam’s oppression of women, killing of homosexuals and terror against Christians and Jews, combined with hatred of the democratic rule of law, furious reactions immediately follow from the media, the left and not least from the perpetually offended Muslim interest organisations. Media and Muslims label any criticism of the Islamic social doctrine as hatred of the Muslim faith, i.e. Islamophobia, which today is as socially stigmatising as antisemitism was 50 years ago. It is therefore not possible today to conduct a reasonable, down-to-earth conversation about the criteria for Danishness. An unbiased public debate on this subject could clear the air and remove the inflammation from a necessary discussion.
Recently, passions have flared again over Nadja Natalie Isaksen from Borgernes Parti, who publicly stated that Radikale Venstre’s deputy leader Samira Nawa “is only Danish in a legal sense”, because as a Muslim she is subject to Allah’s law, which for any Muslim takes precedence over secular, man-made legislation. There may be differing opinions about this statement, but it is neither punishable nor racist, since it is a fact that Islam and popular rule are incompatible entities. Islam is an absolute ideology that demands total acceptance and submission. Islam is not a breakfast buffet where one can pick and choose according to taste. As Imam Abdul Wahid Pedersen says: “As a Muslim, you buy the whole package!”. Thus, the debate about Nawa’s Danishness could concern how one as a Muslim buys the whole package and yet works for a democratic party. Naturally, we did not have this free debate, because media, politicians and commentators mounted the barricades to shout and scream about Islamophobia and racism.
First on the scene was, as always, the leader of the Radikale party, Martin Lidegaard, who once again revealed his total ignorance of Islamic ideology. Lidegaard condemned Isaksen’s hateful speech against Samira Nawa, an attitude that evoked memories of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Germany of the 1930s. The Radikale party leader ought to know that the Nazis were absolutely not Islamophobic, but good friends with Islam, united in their shared hatred of Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded with Nazism as its model and financed by Hitler. And as for the Ku Klux Klan, at the height of its power the organisation was concerned with murdering Black Americans as its primary objective, but also gladly some Jews, who were likewise not popular under the burning crosses. Muslims were never on the Klan’s lists of death. They were the friends who imported more African slaves into Islamic societies than were sent westwards.
The fact that one is a supporter of a fascist ideology such as Islam is, however, no obstacle to being recognised as Danish in Denmark. Unlike Germany, we permit fascist parties such as the communists and National Socialism, and there is neither now nor in the future any legal basis that prohibits parties and movements whose aim is to overthrow the democratic rule of law. On the contrary, with the Quran law (koranloven), we have given Islam as a whole legal protection against “improper treatment”, a protection that also encompasses the entire sharia law. Islam and sharia have come to stay, and in Denmark they are growing healthy and strong.
Samira Nawa can therefore be confident that she will never have to explain how she can have her cake and eat it too – how she reconciles the Radikale party’s all-embracing inclusion of everyone, everywhere, at all times with everyday life in Islamic societies, where women are without legal rights, homosexuals are thrown from rooftops and unbelievers are driven out or murdered.
The suppressed debate about Danishness largely falls into three categories. For official Denmark, the issuance of the Danish passport is the final criterion for Danishness, even though the passport and citizenship are granted by dispensation to migrants who do not master the language, are not self-supporting and otherwise hate Danish popular rule, culture and way of life. Then there are the attitude-Danes, who believe that Danishness arises when one embraces the Danish core values such as the constitution, popular rule and the civic community. And finally there are the lineage-Danes, who associate Danishness with descent from the ancestors who created the country and the culture.
A debate about Danishness as a concept and value could be held at the end of the 20th century, when Grundtvigian Denmark stood in opposition to Georg Brandes’ internationalism, but today an unbiased debate is taboo and suppressed by the tunnel vision of the media and politicians, where free debate is racism. When, then, is one Danish? The Roman poet Marcus Pacuvius gave us the answer more than 2,000 years ago: Ubi Bene Ibi Patria, which freely translated into modern Danish would read: “My homeland is where I am best off”.