Press Release
State Racism Also Characterizes Denmark

Danish politicians are joining the wave of anti-racism that is sweeping through the world right now. Yet another brutal police killing of an unarmed black man has ignited widespread riots in the United States, and demonstrations have spread to other countries, including Denmark.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has gone embarrassingly far in trying to prove her anti-racism that she has posted a picture on her Facebook page of a black friend who lives in Kenya. The fact is, however, that the politicians who are currently in the process of distancing themselves from racism have made themselves representatives and practitioners of Danish state racism.

The ethnic and cultural background of Muslims has over the years been problematized and demonized publicly by Danish politicians and has been the basis of systematic discrimination in Denmark. This is precisely the definition of racism, which is defined by the Danish dictionaries as: "discrimination or hostile attitude towards groups of people because of their ethnic background and foreign appearance, culture, etc." In other words, racism is in fact a structural problem in Denmark.

As late as 2019, an EU-funded report was published entitled “European Islamophobia Report”, which focused on Danish state racism. Among the clear examples of discriminatory measures against Muslims mentioned in the report are the ghetto laws that define residential areas as "ghettos" based on the proportion of residents with a "non-Western" provenance. The report also mentions the "masking ban" and the handshake law. To the list could be added the political attack on Muslim free schools, the preaching law and the so-called hate preaching list among a number of other measures in recent years. This report is yet just one among many international reports on Denmark, which arrives at similar conclusions.

The heartening truth is that for years in Denmark there has been an Islamophobic or rather anti-Islamic political climate and that this results in discriminatory special laws aimed at Muslims. Former Minister of Integration, Inger Støjberg, famously celebrated the 50th law imposed targeting immigrants during her reign with a cake. Her successor, the current Minister of Integration, Mattias Tesfaye, has announced a forthcoming "tightening package" that is clearly targeted at Muslims. In addition, a leaked note has shown how the government would create as much propaganda and noise as possible in society in connection with the launch of the legislative package.

In this context, it should be borne in mind that the hateful climate of debate and the hostile political course towards Muslims have profoundly damaging consequences in society. Secondly, radicalization of public opinion occurs when 28 per cent. of the Danes want to send Muslim immigrants out of the country; and in part, when Muslims are "the religious group that accounts for the largest share of registered hate crime cases in 2018," according to the National Police's report on hate crimes in 2018.

The killing of George Floyd symbolizes more than a primitive hatred of people with darker skin. It represents a structural problem in which a white capitalist elite in the United States divides certain peoples into racial categories and classes to marginalize and suppress them as well as deprive them of influence and dignity. Arbitrary killings of blacks are just one aspect of this structural racism in the United States.

In Denmark, it is evident that Muslims are not considered "equal citizens". For the past two decades, uninterrupted legal austerity has been used as an attempt to stifle Muslims, the purpose of which is to deprive them of their Islamic identity. We have seen the same pattern in general in Europe, where forced assimilation has become the dominant policy.

We strongly condemn Danish state racism, as well as any form of racism in the United States and elsewhere in the world. At the same time, we continue to do everything in our power to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate in the Muslim world, which for 13 centuries proved how Islamic Sharia guarantees equal treatment for people, regardless of their ethnicity, appearance or social background. Not until the re-establishment of the Caliphate (Khilafah) will the world witness Islam's effective eradication of the racist human view and its consequences, such as discrimination, persecution and colonialism.

Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Denmark