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News & Comment
Denmark Maintains its Reputation as a Hysterical Xenophobic Country
News:
A mother down on her knees with her seven-year-old child in the kitchen in her Copenhagen apartment. With a beating heart, she tries to hide from two Danish police officers knocking on her door. She has no idea whether they have come to forcefully deport her, arrest her or whether her son is being forced into family care.
The terrified woman is neither a murderer, a scammer, nor a ghost driver. Brooke Harrington was a professor of economic sociology at Copenhagen Business School. Shortly before this incident, she had just published a bestselling Danish book.
The reason for the police visit, which she described in an op-ed in the internationally known newspaper, The New York Times, was that she had violated the Danish immigration law by giving an expert lecture in Parliament.
In her post, she criticizes Denmark's xenophobic policies, which has also hit another foreign professor, Jimmy Martínez-Correa of Columbia.
Comment:
Nationalism, xenophobia and intolerance have been a systematic policy led by the politicians of this country. This has not been accidental. Although the policies have primarily targeted Muslims, Harrington's story shows that it has not spared non-Muslim academics from even Western countries. The sociology professor also mentions, among other things, the infamous cake celebration of former Minister of Integration, Inger Støjberg, and the constantly tightened laws as examples of Denmark's xenophobia in her New York Times piece.
Not long ago, an EU-funded report, the European Islamophobia Report, concluded that Islamophobia is common and very pronounced in Denmark. The report cites discriminatory legislation targeting Muslims as examples of this. For the past 15 years, UN and EU agencies as well as human rights organizations have published study after study criticizing Denmark for systematic and institutionalized discrimination against especially Muslims.
The politicians typically use diffuse terms such as “Danishness" and xenophobic slogans like "Denmark for Danes" when they appeal to the inner beast of the people to justify their hateful politics. The hatred has reached such highs that Denmark has gradually established an international reputation as a hysterical xenophobic country.
In Islam, on the other hand, nationalism, racism and discriminatory policies against religious or ethnic minorities are clearly prohibited. They are forbidden in Shariah and go against explicit texts in the Qur'an and ahadith of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). As the Islamic Shariah will be embodied in the coming Khilafah Rashidah (rightly guided Caliphate), scholars, academics, and scientists from around the world - of every ethnicity and religion - will be warmly welcomed, as they were welcomed by the Khilafah earlier in history.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Taimullah Abu-Laban