There is indeed a very bad smell coming out Denmark. The country which gave us the blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) has now plumbed fresh depths. It is going to take all jewelry and other items valued at more than $300 from Syrian refugees who make it to Danish territory. The reason? To cover the cost of looking after them.
But do not think too badly of the Danes. They are going to let arriving migrants keep their wedding rings as well as their mobile phones. Such generosity!
It is hard to credit any country behaving so callously. Denmark once had a proud reputation for tolerance. During the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, the Germans ordered all Danish Jews to sew on a Star of David. The very next day the country’s King Christian X went out for his normal morning ride wearing a Star of David. Almost immediately thousands of other Danes copied him.
Denmark is clearly a very different country today. It has a new right-wing government that campaigned on a platform that promised a clampdown on payments to migrants. A minister in the new government has made no secret of the fact that the new rules, which include the halving of benefits, are designed to discourage asylum seekers.
It might have been expected that the Danish action would cause outrage among fellow EU states. Yet what protests that have been made have been remarkably muted. The unpleasant reality is that despite the generous response of Germany, which may have received a million largely Syrian asylum seekers this year, the majority of EU governments are turning their face against the tide of human misery. Hungary’s maverick right-wing prime minister Viktor Orban pioneered a clampdown on refugees and his unwelcoming policies have been adopted by the new Polish government. Austria has been equally ungenerous to migrants, hurrying as many as possible through its territory to Germany.
In Belgium and France the tide of anti-migrant sentiment is growing. The defeat of the racist National Front in the second round of France’s municipal elections was only achieved by Socialist Party voters overcoming their distaste and voting for right-wing candidates of Nicolas Sarkozy’s Republican Party.
Europe is shifting dangerously toward Islamophobia. Though governments protest that they honor their Muslim minorities and value multiculturalism, the facts on the ground are clearly becoming different. Muslims are being equated with terrorism. European countries do not want terrorism, therefore the pernicious conclusion is that they do not want Muslims. The wave of desperate refugees from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan is thus starting to be used as a lever against established Muslim communities within EU countries.
Post-war Europe’s proud tradition of tolerance is disappearing to be replaced by an increasingly ugly bigotry. Sadly, every society will always have its minority of individual racists who will not tolerate outsiders. But in a sane world, such racists can be contained. It is a very different matter when governments themselves start to embrace degrading discriminatory policies. Denmark’s decision to rob newly-arrived refugees is extremely disturbing. Hopefully, it will immediately be challenged in the European Court. But even if Copenhagen’s distasteful policy is overturned, the genie of officially-sanctioned prejudice has already escaped. The consequences for Europe, as much as for the migrants, could be incalculable.
