Islamists deride Danish anti-radicalisation plan

The Copenhagen municipality last week announced that it was working on a four-year integration plan, supported by a committee of external experts under Swedish terror expert Magnus Rantorp. 

 

But Hizb ut-Tahrir on Sunday roundly rejected proposals to collaborate with moderate Muslims to prevent members of the Islamic community being pulled into violent terrorist movements. 

 

“We Muslims in no way need your help in pulling us down into a sad, western culture where youth suffer from a capitalist existential void which causes widespread depression, addiction, self-injury, and even an alarmingly high rate of suicide,” Junes Kock, the Danish convert who serves as the group’s media spokesman, wrote in a statement on Sunday. 

 

"It is clearly the Danish people who need help finding the correct meaning of life," he added provocatively. "And here we can assist." 

 

In the statement, Kock attacked the municipality’s plans as “deception”, “manipulation”, and an attempt to artificially “split the Muslim community into two wings; the ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’. 

 

He warned that the municipality intended to treat Muslim fundamentals such as “a beard, prayer, scarf and general compliance with Islamic behaviour” as signs of radicalisation, in a clear attempt to stigmatise observant followers of the religion. 

 

“We in Hizb ut-Tahrir will make all Muslims aware of these plans and their actual objective," he warned. "So-called experts or not; your plans are doomed to fail.” 

 

Hizb ut-Tahrir has campaigned since 1953 for the establishment of a global Islamic Caliphate, although unlike groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, it claims to reject the use of violence to establish its goal. 

 

Active in some 40 countries around the world, it runs its Scandinavia chapter from Copenhagen. 

 

In 2002, the group ran into controversy in Denmark after its members handed out leaflets in Copenhagen with a clear anti-Semitic message. 

 

“The Jews are a people of slander... a treacherous people... they fabricate lies and twist words from their right context,” the leaflets read, before justifying suicide bombings in Israel as "legitimate" acts of "Martyrdom".