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News
The Copenhagen Post cphpost.dk
23 - 29 November 2012
Peter Stanners Politicians, journalists, academics and young Muslims weigh into the debate – everyone has an opinion
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hen a housing association in Kokkedal voted to cancel its annual 7,000 kroner Christmas tree and celebration three days after spending 60,000 kroner on a party celebrating the Muslim holiday of Eid, the story quickly went viral. Religious intolerance was blamed for the cancellation of the Christmas celebrations after initial reports suggested that a majority on the housing association’s board were Muslim. Some of the board members later explained that the Christmas tree was axed because no-one wanted to take responsibility for getting it. The actual story is not so clear, however. Politiken newspaper has reported that only three of the nine board members were Muslim, while the chairman of the housing association said that she had offered to take on the responsibility of buying the Christmas tree, though this is not noted in the minutes of the meeting. The details remain sketchy, but this hasn’t stopped politicians from telling the public that dark forces are at play. “Some might say that it is merely a banal disagreement over a little case within a board,” MP Karen Jespersen (Venstre) wrote in an opinion piece on
Berlingske’s website. “But the case has a larger perspective. It shows how radical Muslims react when they get power.” That view was shared by a number of opinion writers who argued cancelling the Christmas tree demonstrated a tendency by Muslims to use democratic tools to replace Danish cultural norms with their own. Soon after, Ekstra Bladet tabloid ran a story about how the Salvation Army noticed that around 90 percent of those asking for support over Christmas in a small town in Jutland had names that were not traditionally Danish. “We noticed that many had foreign names,” the Salvation Army spokesperson told Ekstra Bladet. “Let’s just call them Muslims.” MP Pia Kjærsgaard (Dansk Folkeparti) smelled blood. “At a time when a Muslimdominated housing association uses all of its resources to fight the Danish traditions of Christmas cheer and Christmas trees, Muslims also stand in line to ask for Christmas help,” Kjærsgaard wrote on Facebook. “For what? Hardly to celebrate Jesus’s birth or to mark the Christian holiday in any other way.” To Susi Meret, an assistant professor at Aarhus University and expert in far-right politics, the arguments have been predictable. But she questioned how the two local stories had become nationwide news so suddenly. “The story brought up value issues and the supposed threat that the Muslim ethnic minority
Colourbox
Value politics in spotlight again after Christmas tree row
For many, the argument over the tree was a sign of a Muslim takeover
represents to Danish traditions,” Meret said. She explained that the debate over Danish values was a staple of the former government but had been dormant for some time. The speed at which this story revived the anti-Muslim rhetoric demonstrated that value politics are far from dead and buried. “Value politics were suddenly revived by this local story that became national news. And this happened despite the fact that we do not know precisely what happened within the board,” Meret said. “The members who were interviewed were suddenly on national news and weren’t necessarily people who know how to talk to the media without misrepresenting themselves.” Nils Holtug, an assistant professor at the Department of Media, Cognition and Commu-
You cannot blame everyone for what five idiots at a board meeting decide nication at the University of Copenhagen, says that the popularity of the story demonstrates the fact that many Danes are still suspicious about multiculturalism. “Looking at polls, it seems that Danes don’t embrace multicultural policies, like those in the UK and the Netherlands, because of fears about the illiberal tenets in Islam,” Holtug said, adding that views toward immigration in Denmark are very polarised. According to Holtug, the
Christmas tree debate also exposed a tension between conservative and liberal voices in Denmark: the former arguing that Danish traditions should be privileged, and the latter contending that democratic votes should be respected regardless of the outcome. These two views were represented in opinion pieces published in the wake of the story. Yildiz Akdogan, a former MP for Socialdemokraterne, suggested that the board should have been more sensitive to the needs of the minority. “One of the principal tasks of a democracy is to ensure that the rights of minorities are respected: in this case, the minority’s interest in having a Christmas tree,” Akdogan wrote in an opinion piece on Berlingske, adding on her Facebook profile: “The media need to remember that you cannot blame everyone for what five idiots at a board meeting decide.” Politiken editor Anita Bay Bundegaard argued, on the other hand, that critics of the decision to cancel the tree were hypocrites. “Where in the world could these people in Kokkedal have got the idea that a majority is a majority, and that a minority have to accede to the decision of the majority?” she wrote. “The Mohammed cartoons strike me
as the best showcase for this point of view.” She then referred to how supporters of Jyllands-Posten newspaper’s decision to publish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed argued that, regardless of how offended Danish Muslims may get, their right to publish the cartoons was secured to them through the democratic system, and that the minority has to make do with the will of the majority. Given that at least one board member refused to buy the Christmas tree because he was a Muslim, there is an indication that a breakdown in cultural communication could be to blame for the Christmas tree fiasco: a communication breakdown that Akdogan argues represents “a sad pattern in social housing areas where more and more – mostly young – people describe themselves firstly as Muslim, and second as Danish.” According to Samira Nawa, the former chairman of the New Danish Youth Council, Kjærsgaard and Jespersen are partly responsible for this shift due to their anti-Muslim rhetoric. “These politicians are just pushing Muslims further away and into the hands of more radical groups, and that’s a huge problem for both them and society as a whole,” Nawa said. “Young Muslims like me, who are educated and part of society, want to contribute. But we feel that every time we do something for our beloved Denmark, we are treated as second-class citizens. It’s as though you cannot be both Danish and Muslim.”
Bilingual students better mixed Sex purchase ban gets dropped
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he number of schools with high concentrations of bilingual students is on the wane despite an increase of bilingual students overall at the country’s 1,500 schools. Most of the bilingual students are ethnic minorities, and their increased presence at Danish schools over the last 20 years has led to many parents turning to private education. However, Copenhagen and Aarhus have in recent years made efforts to alter the composition of their schools in order to improve student performance by spreading out bilingual students. Initiatives includes busing students to other districts, merging schools and making alterations to the school districts have all been implemented to change the student base of certain schools. The plan looks to be working. Last year, 55 schools consisted of more than 40 percent bilingual students, a number
that is down from 64 schools in 2009. And a number of schools that were previously known for their extremely high numbers of bilingual students are reducing their percentage, such as Rådmandsgade School in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district. There the proportion of bilingual students has fallen from 75 percent to 63 percent in the last three years. “When registering, parents don’t ask as much about the number of bilingual students as they used to,” headteacher Lise Egholm told Jyllands-Posten newspaper. “Today, they know that there are lots of ethnically Danish children.” One of the issues is that several tests have indicated that if the classroom composition contains more than 40 percent of bilingual students, it has a negative effect on grades as well as their results in the Pisa-test, a global student-evaluation. Furthermore, once the public school composition of bilingual students exceeds 30 percent, well-off parents begin shifting their kids to private schools. Yasar Cakmak, the headteacher of Amager Fælled School, said that in addition to changing the make-up of
the student body, the school had also organised community outreach and open-house events for parents. “It’s been a tough struggle, but it’s moving in the right direction,” Cakmak told JyllandsPosten. “The challenge is to earn the trust of the parents so they don’t dismiss us due to rumours and myths.” While many see bringing down the percentage of bilingual students as a way to improve student performance, not everyone believes that spreading is the answer. “Instead of spreading out the bilingual students, they should train the teachers and ensure that some schools specialise in handling the bilingual students and catering to their needs,” Christian Horst, a lecturer and researcher of multicultural education at Aarhus University, told Jyllands-Posten “We need to stop seeing bilingual students as a disruptive element.” There is still a considerable number of parents in Copenhagen who choose to put their children into private schools, and that number has not increased in recent years. (CW)
Ray Weaver
Colourbox
Despite positive results of programmes to disperse bilingual students, experts suggest that doing so is not a way to improve school quality
Proposed ban on buying sex dropped after review by Justice Ministry committee
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proposal that would make it illegal to purchase sex has been given the thumbs down by a Justice Ministry committee charged with determining the legality and feasibility of proposed legislation. Even though making the purchase of sex illegal has broad support in parliament, the coalition government decided last week to accept the recommendation by Straffelovrådet to bury the proposal. The ban was aimed at criminalising the johns, not prostitutes. “I imagine that we will now look for a milder solution,” Pernille Vigsø Bagge, the equality spokesperson for coalition member Socialistisk Folkeparti (SF), told Politiken newspaper. Bagge joined Socialdemokraterne (S) equality spokesperson Rasmus Horn Langhoff in stressing that both parties are still in favour of banning sex purchases. “SF adopted the policy in
The buying and selling of sex will remain legal in Denmark
executive committee in 2005 and we have not changed our minds,” said Bagge. Langhoff’s party came out in favour of a ban in 2009 after a heated internal struggle. Mette Frederiksen (S), the current employment minister and the party’s social welfare spokesperson at the time the ban was proposed, was a strong advocate of criminalising prostitution. The justice minister, Morten Bødskov (S), is on record as opposing the criminalisation of the sex trade. Straffelovrådet, which will release its report next week, is under his jurisdiction. The gender equality minister, Manu Sareen (Radikale),
said during the 2011 election that he supported banning the sex trade because it exploited women. Last month, he told parliament he is no longer sure a ban is the best solution. Dorit Otzen, who runs a shelter for prostitutes in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro, was disappointed that parliament would not pass the ban. “I have seen the consequences of prostitution for many, many years,” she told Politiken. The government is now expected to offer help to sex trade workers and trafficked women through counselling and other support programmes.