Ghettos are not Denmark

Foto: ADRIAN JOACHIM
The prime minister says that more than just police officers are needed to change the mentality in Denmark’s ghettos.
While Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (Lib) is content that the Social Democrats and the Socialist People’s Party are suggesting a lot more police in Denmark’s ghetto areas, he says that the problem is much more intense than a simple police effort can solve.
“Police can’t do it alone. I feel one has to understand that the challenges that we are facing in certain estates has taken on proportions we perhaps haven’t understood,” Løkke Rasmussen says.
“We have some urban areas in which one can ask whether they are Denmark at all,” the prime minister adds. Continue Reading →


Introduction by Nancy Kobrin, author of
February 27th 2008. On a cold and windy Wednesday (for cyclists like myself), I took a deep breath, grabbed the microphone and did something that changed my life. In front of the Copenhagen Mayor’s Integration and Social Services Office there were gathered several journalists, a faithful Muslim musician from the famous MTV-band ‘Outlandish,’ dozens of Imams and Muslim spokesmen and a couple of hundred social workers with Muslim and Danish backgrounds. I began to say what everybody already knew, but, what nobody either wanted or dared to say: that those who are referred to as foreign criminals, religious extremists, or terrorists in the making and who are the cause of lawless parallel societies (what the conference “Diversity and Safety in the City” was about) are all Muslim. I argued that we should stop talking about “criminal foreigners” and start using the more precise term, “criminal Muslims.” As a psychologist, having had more than a hundred Muslim clients, I told them that politicians and professional social workers need to understand the cultural and religious backgrounds of criminal foreigners. That is, if we want to come up with, at least, somewhat effective and targeted plans on how to reduce the social unrest, anti-democratic religious movements, the violent and anti-social forces among foreigners.