COPENHAGEN — Arrested for stabbing a 19-year-old passenger on a commuter train in November 2013, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein blamed his brutal, random and nearly fatal attack on the effects of hashish, telling a court last December that he had been gripped by wild fear and thought his victim wanted to hurt him.
Last weekend, just two weeks after his release from prison for the knife attack, Mr. Hussein went on another violent rampage, killing two strangers and wounding five police officers. But this time he was gripped not by drugs but by a fanatical strand of Islam whose mission, according to a message he posted on Facebook shortly before the attacks, “is to destroy you. We will come to you with slaughter and death.”
Mr. Hussein’s journey from drug-addled street thug to self-proclaimed jihadist declaring loyalty to the Islamic State terrorist group has stirred soul-searching in liberal-minded Denmark over whether Islam in fact was
really a prime motivator for his violence, or merely served as a justifying cover for violent criminality.
“This is a very difficult question to answer,” said Manu Sareen, [Pictured right] the minister for integration and social affairs, who shortly before the attacks launched a program to combat radicalization through outreach to parents, schools and other efforts.
No, it’s not.
Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein murderously attacked a literary-artistic free speech event and then a bat mitzvah. As Willie Sutton might have said, that’s where the money ain’t.
That same question squarely confronts other European countries and the United States. As President Obama holds a summit meeting on ways to combat the lure of jihad in Western nations, he has come under criticism for his cautious language distancing violent extremism from Islam.
The link between the two has become a wellspring of debate in Europe, as societies grapple with the same messy knot of motives and influences following recent attacks in Denmark and France and a thwarted plot in Belgium. All involved angry, alienated young Muslims.
Often the attackers invoke Islam. But just as often, well before they had found religion, the professed jihadists built up long track records as violent criminals.
Though many have become radicalized in prisons, they often seem determined to find an outlet for their violence one way or another.
You know, none of these imponderables ought to make Europeans feel happier about their governments imposing so much immigration on them. Is it Islam that encourages them to be violent criminals preying on Danes? Or are they violent criminals preying on Danes who find Islam validating? In either case, Denmark has found itself in a hole and ought to stop digging when it comes to importing potential parents of more Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, and ought to look for ways to get current ones to leave.
One of a trio of gunmen responsible for the killing spree that terrorized Paris in January, Amedy Coulibaly, similarly fit the bill, chalking up at least six arrests — five for robbery and one for drugs — even before his embrace of anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism led him to storm a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes and kill four people.
“This is classic trajectory into jihadist terrorism in Europe. There is not a single pathway, but this one is very worrying,” said Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on jihadist movements at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. “They are misfits who find a solution to their problems in radical Islam.”
Maybe using immigration policy to turn Denmark into the Peninsula of Misfit Boys isn’t such a good idea? Denmark used to have a right of center ruling coalition that was semi-decent on immigration, but after a decade or so they lost, and the new left of center coalition seems intent on using immigration to elect a new people for itself.
In embracing violence in the name of Islam, Mr. Hussein, a former member of a Copenhagen criminal gang called the Brothas, “substituted one subculture for another,” Mr. Hegghammer said, adding, “The easier it is for someone to plug into this radical Islamic subculture the more radicalized misfits you are going to have.”
“At the moment it is very easy,” he said, referring to a plethora of extremist websites and underground preachers.
Announcing new measures on Thursday to fight against terrorism, including extra funding for intelligences services, Danish officials did not mention religion while vowing to defend what Mette Frederiksen, the justice minister, described as “one of the most generous societies there are.”
Perhaps generous Scandinavian welfare systems and mass immigration don’t really go well together?
… Mr. Mann, who is now studying law and works part time as a counselor to troubled Muslim youths, said Denmark and other European countries needed to defend, not stigmatize, Islam as only this can combat “street Islam,” a toxic jumble of half-digested lines from the Quran and political passions plucked from the Internet.
Olivier Roy, a leading French expert on Islam, has taken a similar line, telling Information, a Danish newspaper, that Denmark should counter wild strains of Islam imported from the Middle East by building up a “national version of Islam” through state funding for mosques and preachers, just as it funds Denmark’s state church. …
That so many young Muslims feel angry at and alienated from a country that offers their families some of the world’s most generous welfare benefits has left many Danes flummoxed and also angry. This in turn has helped fuel the rise of the Danish People’s Party, an anti-immigration group that regularly denounces Muslim misbehavior and, according to opinion polls, now stands neck-and-neck in popularity with the biggest mainstream parties.
“It is very, very obvious that these attacks were connected to religion,” Soren Espersen, deputy chairman of the Danish People’s Party, said in an interview. “There is no doubt this was religious terrorism,” he said, adding that Mr. Hussein had himself declared to be “acting in the name of Islam.”
A survey published Wednesday by Metroxpress, a newspaper, found that half of Danes surveyed want to restrict immigration and a quarter want to ensure that Muslims never account for more than 5 percent of the population. The government is barred by law from classifying residents by religion but a study by Aarhus University in 2013 found that Muslims represented around 4.2 percent of the population. …
The government, headed by the Social Democratic prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has sought to avoid a public backlash against Muslims by insisting that Islam and Western values can coexist. “This is not a war between Islam and the West,” the prime minister declared immediately after the attacks.
Here’s a novel angle from the NYT:
As in many other European countries, however, Muslims in Denmark may coexist with their non-Muslim neighbors, but they often cling to the values and conspiracy-driven mind-set of their home countries.
Mr. Mann, the law student and youth counselor, for example, said he was convinced that the United States government had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “You have to be blind” to think otherwise, he said.
Helime al-Amed, a Palestinian from Syria and mother of five children in Mjolnerparken, the housing project where Mr. Hussein grew up, praised Denmark as a generous and friendly country, but she still believes that last weekend’s attacks were “orchestrated by people who are against us, who want to provoke anger at Muslims.”
Mr. Hussein, she added, had been deliberately killed by police officers in a shootout Sunday morning to prevent him from talking. “When he died the truth died with him,” she said.
So, maybe it would be okay with The New York Times for Denmark to crack down on immigration from Muslim countries, but not from Muslim Countries per se, because that would be Islamophobic, but instead from countries with Conspiracy Theorist cultures (which just happen to be overwhelmingly Muslim), because Conspiracy Theorism is Bad, so being Conspiracy Theoriphobic is thus Good.
Interesting …
Like I’ve been saying, people in the American media aren’t really that excited about vicious Muslims murdering Jews and people in the European media, so there’s some tiny sliver of a chance that greater sanity might emerge from this.
But the American press spent so many decades constructing their Guns of Singapore to pound down the cisgender straight white native male menace via Diversity that it’s hard for them to come out and imply, oh, sorry, I guess we were wrong, or even we weren’t wrong in the past, but we’ve been so successful in denouncing the Looming Arizona Fourth Reich that we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
So, let’s think about baby steps for the Holders of the Megaphone to inch themselves around to this new idea that the real problem isn’t immigration from Muslim cultures, it’s immigration from cultures that are infected with Conspiracy Theorist thinking, so immigration restriction could be thought of not as Islamophobic but as … Pro-Science!
It will take years to get there, but let me toss out an idea as a start that could be rolled out to begin the conditioning process without alarming the SWPLs and SJWs. This anti-Conspiracy Theorist triple bankshot idea needs an initial straight white male face.
And I’ve got one for them: in the grand tradition of aged Hollywood actors turning into nutty caricatures of their most popular roles, Randy Quaid, (above right) who played the crazy conspiracy theorist in Independence Day, has turned into a crazy conspiracy theorist. Quaid is holed up in Canada, which he claims he fled to not because of legal problems in the U.S., but because he fears for his life from a conspiracy of “star whackers” who murder Hollywood stars.
So, start off with articles about how the country is better off without conspiracy theorists like Randy Quaid around.
