Denmark: Opposition party official suggests unhappy Muslims should find another place to live

Remember yesterday, in a post about Europe and the Arab Spring, here, I reported that writer Anat Berko suggested it will be Western women who lead the way back from the brink of cultural annihilation.

Inger Støjberg Photo: Scanpix

Add Inger Støjberg  to the list!

And, this made me laugh my head off, critics said “her approach to Danish Muslims lacked nuance!”  Nuance!  WTF! (sorry, we don’t use profanity here, but I can’t help myself sometimes!).  Nuance! when Europe is going down the tubes!

From the Copenhagen Post (Hat tip: Fjordman via twitter)

Muslims who show no interest in adopting Danish values ought to think about why they settled in Denmark in the first place, the immigration spokesperson for leading opposition party Venstre argued in an opinion piece published in Politiken newspaper today.

In her piece, Inger Støjberg criticises Danish Muslims who actively try to shield themselves from Danish values and norms and who think that their religious beliefs should not be allowed to be mocked.

Støjberg pointed to a study of Danish Muslims in which 55 percent responded that criticising religion should be banned and 64 percent thought that free speech should be limited in particular circumstances.

“Denmark is the land of the Danes and you are more than welcome to become a Dane and take part in the work and community,” Støjberg wrote. “But to those Muslims who constantly work against us, constantly question us, are unsatisfied, encourage going to holy war in Syria, commit honour killings, belittle our values, flag or way of living – to all of you: Go and find somewhere else to live. No one is forcing you to stay. We accepted you and now it’s up to you to show the necessary respect for our society and the values it is built upon.”  [Of course we all know they are not in Denmark to become Danes, but to change Denmark into a Muslim country.—ed]

Probably squishy men who said this (it’s the same sort of thing they say about Pamela Geller):

Government parties Socialdemokraterne (S) and Socialistisk Folkeparti both said they agreed with the general points made by Støjberg, but that her approach to Danish Muslims lacked nuance.

But, will Støjberg and Venstre go this far?

Spotting an opportunity, Martin Henriksen, integration spokesperson for Dansk Folkeparti, proposed that Venstre should use this opportunity to follow up with strict policies aimed at curbing migration from Muslim countries.

“I think that Venstre and Dansk Folkeparti should join together for the next election with a goal of reducing Muslim immigration to somewhere close to zero. It is the most effective solution to ensure that Denmark will remain socially and culturally united in the decades ahead,” Henriksen said.

By the way, one of the most read posts this year at RRW is this one where Laura Ingraham called for a halt to all Muslim immigration to America.

Addendum: Remember back in 2010 the Ft. Morgan, CO police chief went to Denmark (the trip was paid for by the US State Department) ostensibly to learn how to integrate Ft. Morgan’s Muslim refugee population from a country with lots of successful experience.  Do you think they might send him back now to have a follow-up chat with Henriksen and Støjberg?

Here is our archive of the many posts we’ve written about Denmark and its immigrant population.

Turkey’s Erdogan “sitting on social bomb” (Syrian refugees!)

Are refugee camps re-supplying Syrian rebels?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave this summer, you know that Turkey’s increasingly Islamist supremacist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, incidentally often identified as Obama’s only real friend among world leaders (here he names five friends), is having serious domestic problems stemming from his people, mostly the young, who do not want Turkey to become a theocracy.  LOL!  I bet he is watching Egypt very closely!

Obama to Erdogan: I love you! 2011 AP Photo

Now it seems his problems could get worse because he “welcomed” tens of thousands of Syrian refugees to Turkey who are now, to put it mildly, rubbing the locals the wrong way.

From Assyrian International News Service:

Domestic developments in Turkey have turned public focus away from Ankara’s growing problem with Syrian refugees. Caught between its welcoming rhetoric toward predominantly Sunni Syrians fleeing the wrath of Bashar al-Assad, and the realities on the ground in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the problem. All the while, he complains about the lack of international support in this regard.

Meanwhile, unease grows in Turkish towns and cities near the Syrian border where large numbers of Alevis sympathetic to Assad live. It seems that the welcome extended to fleeing Syrians by Ankara is wearing thin among locals, who are turning against the refugees, accusing them of disrupting the normal life of the region.

After a lament about how much all of this is costing Turkey, and that the international community isn’t helping much, comes this dynamite bit of news—refugee camps may be resting places for Sunni-fighters traveling back and forth to Syria.

Meanwhile, Kirisci (Kemal Kirisci, from the Brookings Institution in Washington), like other observers — including the ICG — indicates that the Turkish public appears to be increasingly wary of the presence of an ever-growing number of refugees. “There are reports of complaints about property rents rising in towns and cities close to the border areas as well as about wages being pushed down by refugees who take up jobs in the border regions,” Kirisci wrote in his blog post.  [Ho hum, refugees take jobs and limited rental properties from locals, what else is new!—ed]

Referring to the issue of local discontent, the ICG indicated in April that several of the camps in Turkey are being used by predominantly Sunni opposition fighters from Syria as off-duty resting places to visit their families, receive medical services and purchase supplies. (Are they picking up American weapons there too?—ed)

“This is exacerbating sensitive ethnic and sectarian balances, particularly in Hatay province, where more than one third of the population is of Arab Alevi descent and directly related to Syria’s Alawites,” said the report. Local discontent with the Syrian refugees is, however, not just restricted to the Alevis.

Then there was the thwarted kidnapping of a child (by Syrians) from a prominent Turkish family:

Anger toward the Syrians peaked after the twin car bomb attacks in the town of Reyhanli, near the Syrian border, on May 11. About 53 people, mostly Sunnis, were killed in the atrocity allegedly perpetrated by pro-Assad operatives in Turkey, who were later arrested and now face trials. There were angry demonstrations in Reyhanli against the refugees after the bombing by nationalist elements, leaving many Syrians in doubt as to whether they are safe in Turkey.

Already faced with difficulties as a result of their burgeoning numbers, Syrian refugees also have to cope with claims that are bound to agitate local Turks. Sefik Cirkin, a deputy for Hatay from the ultra-nationalist and predominantly Sunni National Movement Party (MHP), for example, said in June that some Syrians had been thwarted by the Turkish police as they tried to abduct the child of a prominent Turkish family in the region.

Indicating that Reyhanli and Antakya, the capital of Hatay province, were “sitting on a social bomb,” as some tried to ignite sectarian conflict between local Alevis and Sunnis, Cirkin went on to ask in a loaded fashion, “What would have happened if this child had been abducted?”

Erdogan has problems! (no kidding!), and I hope they become so great (refugees cost a fortune!) that he must stop building the massive Islamic center in Maryland!

The last thing Erdogan needs at a time when he is facing nationwide protests by anti-government elements, that are also angry over his failed Syria policy, is to have an Alevi-Sunni conflict on his hands, a prospect that has never been far from the surface in Turkey. Some would argue that he himself fueled sectarian animosity with his pro-Sunni Syrian policy.

Do you remember the Jewish refugees of 1948?

Probably not because it is one of those inconvenient historical truths that is buried by the media and policy-makers in their six-decades-old lament about “Palestinian refugees.”

Jewish refugees cross the desert in Yemen. Photo: Courtesy Israeli National Photo Archive

There is a good summary at Frontpage magazine earlier this month (hat tip: Richard Falknor at Blue Ridge Forum).  We have covered this subject in several previous posts which can be found in our Israel and refugees category, here.

June 20 was World Refugee Day, dedicated to nearly 60 million people worldwide who were forcibly displaced by conflict or persecution. One group of refugees rarely acknowledged is the Jews who were indigenous to Muslim lands but compelled to flee around the time that the State of Israel was established.

A Google search for “1948 refugees” produces about 6 million results. All but a few (at least through page six) are about the Palestinian Arab refugees, as if they were the only refugees of 1948. But it is estimated that from the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War through the early 1970s, up to 1,000,000 Jews fled or were expelled from their ancestral homes in Muslim countries. 260,000 of those refugees reached Israel between 1948 and 1951 and comprised 56% of all immigration to the fledgling state. By 1972, their numbers had reached 600,000.

In 1948, Middle East and North African countries had considerable Jewish populations: Morocco (250,000), Algeria (140,000), Iraq (140,000), Iran (120,000), Egypt (75,000), Tunisia (50,000), Yemen (50,000), Libya (35,000), and Syria (20,000). Today, the indigenous Jews of those countries are virtually extinct (although Morocco and Iran each still has under 10,000 Jews). In most cases, the Jewish population had lived there for millennia.

Read it all.

Photo is from this 2012 article at the Jerusalem Post.