Danish Psychologist: “Integration of Muslims in Western Societies Is Not Possible”

I am going to reprint this article in toto below. I agree with every single thing that this man says. Further, I agree with his conclusions. All immigration of Muslims to Europe must stop. We should help repatriate Muslims those Muslims who wish to return to their Islamic societies. We should only allow in Muslims who have essentially left their religion and are no longer Muslims. We don’t have a similar problem yet with Muslims in the US and Canada as they do on the Continent, so I see no need yet to cut off Muslim immigration to the US or Canada. Which European countries should halt all Muslim immigration? Those which are having serious problems with Muslims and crime and terrorism: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, the UK and Germany. I’m not aware of any other European countries that are having serious problems with Muslim immigrants and crime/terrorism and antisocial behaviors. If you can think of any other countries this applies to, let us know in the comments. This is one area where the Left has gone stark raving insane. They support the mass immigration of unassimilable, antisocial, criminal Muslims in the West for no rational reason. Instead, who is protesting the invasion of this reactionary culture to the West. Our very own Western reactionaries! We dropped the ball in fighting Muslim reaction, so now it is up to our own reactionaries to fight their Muslim reactionary brethren. Ridiculous! I do not feel that this psychologist is a reactionary or a conservative. On the contrary, he seems like a very liberal of even Leftist fellow, judging by his language. He’s simply doing what we no longer do on the Left: Tell it like it is. It is incomprehensible to me why we on the Left are supporting this reactionary culture. Why would this immigration ban be such a hardship for the poor Muslims? Let them stay in their sandboxes. If their Muslim culture really is so fantastic and wonderful, surely their Muslim societies must be better places to live than the depraved and degenerate West, no? Eh? This is not so? Why is that, Muslims? Oh Muslims! Look in the mirror for the answer. Danish integration problems with Muslims became public worldwide in 2006 when the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Exactly two years later riots broke out again because of the reprint of the Mohammed cartoons by all major Danish newspapers. Currently 7 In February 2009, Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist published a book entitled Among criminal Muslims. A psychologist’s experience from Copenhagen. In his book, Nicolai Sennels shares a psychological perspective of this Muslim Culture, its relationship to anger, handling emotions and its religion. He based his research on hundreds of hours of therapy with 150 young Muslims in the Copenhagen youth jail. EuropeNews interviewed the author about his book and its consequences on integration of Muslims in Europe. EuropeNews: Nicolai Sennels, how did you get the idea to write a book about criminal Muslims in Denmark? Nicolai Sennels: I got the idea in February 2008 during a conference on integration in Copenhagen, where I was invited as the first and only psychologist working in a Copenhagen youth prison. My speech at the conference was about the fact, that foreigners’ culture plays a significant role concerning integration, crime and religious extremism. I emphasized, that people from a Muslim culture find it difficult, if not impossible, to create a successful life in Denmark. This statement was met with great resistance from Danish politicians and also my own boss from the youth prison. I was quite surprised since I thought that my point is obvious: some cultures fit better into Western societies than others. All of Europe is currently struggling to integrate Muslims but this endeavor seems to be impossible. According to the Danish police and the Danish Bureau of Statistics more than 7 My statement resulted in a legal injunction, a kind of professional punishment, which stated, that if I ever repeat this, I could be fired. According to the Copenhagen authorities it is apparently permitted to state that the serious problems among Muslims are caused by poverty, the media, the police, the Danes, politicians, etc. But two things are definitely not allowed: 1) discussing the significance of culture and 2) our foreigners own responsibility for their integration in our societies. Unfortunately many very powerful politicians lack a clear understanding of the psychological aspect of culture and the influence it has on integration. EuropeNews: What were the reactions in Denmark? Sennels: The book was received with a great amount of attention, already before the book was officially published on February 24 2009. It was on the front page of one of the biggest national newspapers in Denmark, and I was on the radio and TV participating in debates with politicians and other experts on the subject. The first publication of the book was sold out after three weeks. Since then, there have been some big changes in Danish integration policy, which seems to have been influenced by the book and the attention it got. From my personal point of view, the widespread attention shows that my statement is true: there is simply a great need for a deeper understanding of how Muslims’ culture influences their chances for integration. The very famous politician, Naser Khader, who is Muslim and the author of the bestseller “Honor and Shame”, wrote a review of my book and stated that it should be “obligatory reading for students, social workers and teachers.” Jyllands-Posten, the brave newspaper that first published the Mohammed cartoons, calls the book “an original piece of pioneer work”. EuropeNews: Let’s have a closer look at the book. You talk about four myths of integration. The first one concerns the difference between the cultures of immigrants. Sennels: What I discovered during my work at the youth prison was that people of Muslim heritage have other needs for social work than Danes or people of non-Muslim cultures. These different needs require more attention, and psychologists need to do more research on these topics in order to be able to create effective social politics. I completely agree with my critics that personal and social problems can lead to anti-social behavior among both Westerners and Muslims. However, there is still extremely disproportional anti-social and anti-democratic behavior among Muslims. The Danish Bureau of Statistics published a report (1 and 2) stating that Muslim countries take the first eight places on the top 10-list of criminals’ country of origin. Denmark is number nine on this list. EuropeNews: So that means, we have to treat Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants in a different way? Sennels: Seen from a psychological and also humanistic perspective, it is very clear that people from different cultures have different needs when they have or create problems. My own experience is that Muslims don’t understand our Western way of trying to handle conflicts through dialogue. They are raised in a culture with very clear outer authorities and consequences. Western tradition using compromise and inner reflection as primary means of handling outer and inner conflicts is seen as weak in the Muslim culture. To a great extent they simply don’t understand this softer and more humanistic way of handling social affairs. In the context of social work and politics this means that they need more borders and stronger consequences to be able to adjust their behavior. EuropeNews: That leads us directly to the second myth: it is often said, that the criminality of immigrants is caused by social problems, not by their cultural background. In your book you disagree and point to the religion of the Muslims as a source of criminality. Sennels: Well, I would rephrase it as “Muslim culture” instead of “religion” because there are a lot of Muslims who don’t know what is written in the Quran and who don’t visit the mosques. But they are strongly influenced on a cultural level. And there we see that especially anger is much more accepted in the Muslim culture. One example: in Western culture and also in other non-Muslim cultures, like in Asia, you see aggression and a sudden explosion of anger as something you’ll regret afterwards, something you are ashamed of. It is completely opposite in the Muslim culture. If somebody steps on your honor—what I as a psychologist would call self confidence—you are simply expected to show aggression and often also verbal or physical revenge. So, aggression gives you a low status in our cultures, but a high status in the Muslim culture. There is however another and much deeper reason for the wide spread anti-social behavior in Muslim communities and their strong aversion against integration—namely, the very strong identification that Muslims have with belonging to the Muslim culture. My encounter with the Muslim culture has been a meeting with an exceedingly strong and very proud culture. This is certainly something that can ensure an ancient culture’s survival through changing times—Islam and the Muslim culture are excellent examples of this. A strong and proud culture unfortunately also makes the culture’s members almost unable to adapt to other values. In Germany, only 1 EuropeNews: As you already pointed out, a lot of Muslims have a strong connection to their religious identity. The third myth you dismantle in your book is about the percentage of extremist’s and fundamentalists among Muslims. It’s often presumed that this percentage is relatively small. What is your experience? Sennels: People hope that most Muslims are modern and accept Western values. My experience is different, and this has been proven by the statistics in Europe that I just quoted. In February 2008, we had some deadly serious riots by young Muslims in Denmark. Those riots were partly a reaction to the great focus by the Danish police on the steeply rising crime rates in Muslim areas. The other reason was the reprinting of the Mohammed cartoons in all Danish newspapers. This reprinting was an act of solidarity with the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, whose life was, and still is, seriously threatened. In these riots, we saw Muslims who don’t practice the Islamic religion in their daily lives standing up for their culture and religion in a very aggressive way. Copenhagen was smoking for an entire week due to several hundred of fires, and the police and firemen trying to calm the situation down were also attacked. A big part of the rioters ended up in the prison where I worked, and I therefore I had the chance to talk with them. Almost all of them were Muslims, and they all claimed that what they have done—starting fires, attacking the police etc.—was justified since Danish society, through its pressure on integration and through reprinting the Mohammed cartoons, has proven itself to be racist and against Islam and Muslim culture. The few Danish people among the rioters were completely different. Their explanation of their actions was predominately a search for adventure or excitement. EuropeNews: The fourth myth is that poverty among immigrants leads to their bad social situation. In your book, you tell us that the opposite is true. Sennels: You can formulate this important question like this: do people get social problems because they are poor, or do they become poor because they create social problems? My experience is that the very low focus on supporting one’s children in school and on one’s own education and the lack of motivation for creating a professional career is a crucial factor for the poverty, which many Muslims experience in both our societies and in Muslim countries. On top of it, one fourth of all young male Muslims in Denmark have a criminal record. Poor reading skills, a strong aversion against authorities and a criminal record simply make it very difficult for you to get a well paying job. It is anti-social behavior that makes you poor. Not the other way around. Unfortunately many politicians see poverty as the main cause of integration problems. I think this is a horrible and one-dimensional view of poor people and of people in general. The idea that people’s behavior is decided by the amount of money they have on their bank accounts every month is an exceedingly limited view. I myself, as a psychologist who graduated from the humanities department of the University of Copenhagen, would say that people have many more and stronger factors in their lives than money, which influence their behavior and way of thinking. EuropeNews: What is the conclusion on your research? Is the integration of people of Muslim heritage into Western societies possible? Nicolai Sennels: I would say that the optimists, the people who say that integration is possible, carry a very great responsibility. There is a very great risk that they are selling us hope, a dream, that has no foundation in reality. This means that they will be the ones who are responsible for Europe looking away from and not addressing its problems until it is too late. There is simply no research in Europe that supports the optimists’ view. On the contrary, all the research that we have on integration of Muslims in Western societies shows that we are continuing to head in the wrong direction. So I don’t know how these optimists come to their conclusion. Maybe it is a vain and childish hope that everything will turn out well, just like in the fairy tales. Or maybe it is a pseudo-Darwinistic idea that everything will develop in a positive direction. One thing is for sure: they don’t base their judgments on facts. Of course there are exceptions but for the largest part integration to the necessary degree of Muslims is not possible. Clever and compassionate people are working all over Europe on the problem, and they have spent billions of Euros on the project, yet, the problems still continue to grow. The psychological explanation is actually simple. The Muslim and the Western cultures are fundamentally very different. This means Muslims need to undergo very big changes in their identity and values to be able to accept the values of Western societies. Changing basic structures in one’s personality is a very demanding psychological and emotional process. Apparently very few Muslims feel motivated to do so. I only know a few who managed, but I also know that it was a long and exhausting struggle on an inner level for them and that they often pay a high personal price on the outer level because their Muslim friends and families despise and/or disown them for leaving their culture. EuropeNews: But what we are going to do with the Muslims, who are already here? Sennels: I see two possibilities. Firstly, we should immediately stop all immigration of people from Muslim countries to Europe until we have proven that integration of Muslims is possible. Secondly, we should help Muslims who don’t want to or are not able to integrate in our Western societies to build a new and meaningful life in a society they understand and that understands them. This means to assist them in starting a new life in a Muslim country. We actually have the economic means to do this. As I mentioned previously, the Danish National Bank calculated, that every immigrant from Muslim countries costs 300,000 euros on average. With this money, we could help these people to live a happy life in a Muslim country without having to integrate in a society they don’t understand and therefore cannot accept. Having money enough to support one’s family and live in a country where one feels at home with the surrounding culture would be a great step forward in the quality of their lives. And we should help them achieve this. Not only the individual Muslim, but also European societies will benefit. Muslims immigrating from Europe to Muslim countries will function as ambassadors for more free and democratic societies: due to their experience from living in a democracy with real human rights and their knowledge of the social systems in Europe, they will take very important ideas and values with them. In this way they can do what hopefully most of them dream of, i.e. help their Muslim brothers and sisters in their home countries by changing the poor conditions and from which they moved away from initially.

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30 thoughts on “Danish Psychologist: “Integration of Muslims in Western Societies Is Not Possible””

  1. This is a good article. Thank you for posting it, Robert.
    It looks like white liberals and leftists right now are mainly motivated by fear of being called racists and imperialists. They refuse to stand up for the Western culture that gave birth to their movement. Insane! So you have simpletons like Naomi Wolf defending the most misogynist, backwards Muslim customs, just because they are “people of color”.
    Seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury claim Sharia will need to be integrated into British law makes my blood boil. Why give a shit about immigrants who “do not relate” to the UK legal system?
    It seems as though the Archbishop believes that the Islamicization of the West is deserved punishment for Western imperialism.
    The solution is not for the West to commit cultural suicide. The solution is for the doctrine of “invade the world/invite the world” to end now. We need to cut out the Roman Empire shit, even if it means living a less technological existence. Thanks to peak oil, we’re headed for one anyway.
    Regarding the US, Williams should remember that the majority of Americans are against the wars, but no one listens to us, not even Black Jesus Reagan himself.
    I don’t think we’re the only people on the left who feel this way, Robert. As the FIRE economy implodes, I think more will start speaking out. The Western Left abandoned its economic focus forty years ago, with disastrous results. Right now the so-called left, at least publicly, stands for little besides white guilt. I don’t think the immigration echo chamber can be enforced for much longer.

    1. I get the imprecation that Dearborn is an example of the religious diversity of the Arab World, as opposed to the “Muslim World,” since at least up until recent years, the majority of Arabs there were actually Christians of various types. Catholics, Orthodox, Coptic, etc.
      Now come the Muslims, and Dearborn has a HUGE Shia population, far disproportionate to their real numbers in the Arab World.
      So, once again a journalist confuses the concepts…Ho, hum…

  2. So you have simpletons like Naomi Wolf defending the most misogynist, backwards Muslim customs, just because they are “people of color”.
    Couldn’t have said it better myself.
    As Stephen Sniegoski pointed out, the left can never criticize an officially designated victim group in any way, shape, or form. And since Muslims are “people of color,” they qualify as a victim group beyond criticism, regardless of what they do.
    And as Thaddeus once told J, until people like him can get beyond this juvenile, neo-Marxist belief that being a member of an oppressed class means your shit doesn’t stink, you won’t impress anyone.
    You can see this neo-Marxist thinking at work here.

    1. Female leftist activists in the Occupied Territories have been molested by Palestinian men but they’ve been encouraged to keep quiet by the ISM.

    2. Hey, do you remember that story about the white woman who went to Haiti, got raped, and was thankful for the experience?
      More leftist delusion at work.

    3. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things about conservatism that are also problematic, but at least they don’t flagellate themselves in the same manner.

    4. You got a point there.
      Of course, the fact that we bomb the shit out of various third worlders everyday, most of whom who happen to be “Muslim,” doesn’t help things much in removing the notion of a sanctified, oppressed victim-hood.

  3. “Seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury claim Sharia will need to be integrated into British law makes my blood boil. Why give a shit about immigrants who “do not relate” to the UK legal system?”
    If Muslims can impose Sharia law in their ghettos, can we SA expats start our own mini apartheid regimes in Western countries?

  4. Yah, the whole “Muslim” immigration bit has really screwed over Europe, mostly people from North Africa and Pakistan. That is the “Muslim Heritage” we are talking about in Europe. They are the fanatical trouble makers, and penitent dumb-asses. Certainly excluding the Muslims native to Europe. I guess they get to be legal resident dumb-asses, in that regard.
    Of course, like you say and point out, just coming from a “Muslim Land” shouldn’t be the only criteria, even though plenty of haters wish it would. Here in the U.S, some of the most hardcore atheists I know came from Muslim family backgrounds in the Middle East. Giving them a “Muslim Heritage” label is like telling a Jew he is a Nazi. Doesn’t go over real well. 🙂
    I think it was Olivc(Gay State Girl?) who said I have a “Muslim Heritage.” LOL!
    Doesn’t work that way. To be a Muslim, you have to “believe.” It is just a religion, not a culture, ethnicity, or race. Remove that belief, and you ain’t “Muslim” anymore than an atheist would be a Christian. The problem is, that in Europe, it is the low class and uneducated that are flooding the place. Hence, their religiousness.
    In fact, Islam dilutes the importance of ethnic identity and history, which is a form of cultural genocide, me thinks.
    Oh, and on a side topic, Muslims caused AIDS. Or so my theory goes…

    1. Of course, like you say and point out, just coming from a “Muslim Land” shouldn’t be the only criteria, even though plenty of haters wish it would.
      I’ve known several Christian Arabs. Really nice people.

        1. True, and the liquor stores are “their” industry, along with the Koreans 🙂
          Fun folks to talk with. If you can ever get them to truthfully talk about politics, you’ll hear some interesting stuff.

  5. Dear Robert
    People make far too much of Islam. In the Netherlands, the 4 main non-European immigrant groups are the Maroccans, the Turks, the Antillians and the Surinamers. Of those 4, the Maroccans do the worst but the Turks do the best. What the Dutch and the Germans did was to import poorly educated Turks and Maroccans as guest workers in often declining industries. When those industries went under, many of those guest workers became permanently unemployed. Only 40% of the Turks in the NL between the age of 45 and 65 are in the labor force.
    Recently, Der Spiegel reported a study which showed that if you compare ethnic German elementary school children with Islamic school children, then their educational path doesn’t differ much if you compare children who get the same marks. The problem is just that generally the children of some immigrant groups don’t do as well in school as the children of other immigrant groups.
    I will say that Islam is responsble for the poor performance of Turkish and Arabic immigrants in Europe when you will say that Catholicism is responsible for the poor performance of Mexican and Central American immigrants in the US.
    Islam is becoming a bugbear. The biggest problem with Islamic immigrants is that many favor sharia as the supreme law of the land, but there is no reason to believe that Islamic immigrants can’t do well educationally or economically. You just have to select them right.
    Regards. James

    1. Another immigrant group to the Netherlands is the Indonesians, who from everything I hear, are regarded as having assimilated very successfully. (Though as an ethnic Indonesian myself, I may be getting an unbalanced view.) They are mostly Muslim.
      In contrast, Moroccan immigration to the Netherlands has not been regarded as particularly successful, or so my Dutch relative informs me.
      I do have reservations about mass Islamic immigration to the West, but perhaps the above example demonstrates that it’s not possible to treat all Muslims as if they are the same. Some cultures are far more liberal in their interpretation of the religion, and it can depend on the social class and circumstances of the immigrants in question.

    2. You raise a good point. How different Muslim “groups,” from different countries, with different cultures, traditions and languages…Behave, well, “different.”

  6. Articles promoted by Americans on the threat of Islam in Europe never ring true. American’s acceptance of the ‘Eurabia’ narrative stems from a mixture of ignorance, and hearing what they want to hear.

    1. I’m embarrassed at having been taken in by some of these articles. It was ignorance rather than it being what I wanted to hear.
      I already knew most of the anti-Muslim stuff in the US media was hysterical bullshit. I was just naive about the same thing going on in the European press.

  7. I wouldn’t say its all hysterical. Maybe James is right that if you select them right, Muslim immigrants can do okay educationally and economically. Since, however, they obviously aren’t being selected “right” in many countries, and their numbers are very high, there are real problems.
    I would also say that James’ “when you admit Catholics are responsible…” quip is at least a slight strawman. As the Danish psychologist noted, it’s not necessarily about what is in the Koran (though I do think that’s an important factor), but rather about how they are raised in a generally Islamic culture, much of which is may be more accurately described as Arabian than Islamic (not sure what the perfect name is myself). Of course Muslims in say, Albania or don’t get that kind of cultural upbringing, just as Catholics in Italy don’t have the same culture as Mexican Catholics. Islam is just the most easily recognizable feature to use as an identifying word, but it’s a combination of cultural and genetic aspects, many of which have deep non-Islamic roots, but are still pretty particular to Muslim countries; hence they are identified as Islamic.
    Mexican Catholics don’t fit in America because they’re Mexican, not Catholic. Islamic immigrants because of a combination of culture, race and religion (often differing on a case by case basis).
    If people think it’s just hysteria they need to ‘spain away the crime statistics and conspicuous events like the frequent car BBQs in France.

  8. Dear Eurasian sensation
    There is indeed a considerable number of people of full or partial Indonesian ancestry in the Netherlands, but very few of them are Muslims. They belong essentially to two groups: Dutch-Indonesians and Moluccans.
    The Dutch-Indonesians are hybrids. Usually they had a Dutch father and Indonesian mother, and legally they were Europeans. Before WWII, there were 3 categories of people in Indonesia: Europeans, foreign Asians and natives.
    The Europeans weren’t necessarily white, but natives or half-natives could apply to become European, so many of these halfbreeds became Europeans. After Indonesia became sovereign in 1949, most Europeans, whites as well as non-whites, emigrated to the Netherlands.
    The Moluccans were the Gurkas of the Dutch imperialists. Nearly all of them were converted to protestantism. During the Indonesian war of independence (1946-1949), the Moluccans fought on the Dutch side. After the Dutch defeat, many of those Moluccans ended up in the Netherlands, believing that eventually the Moluccans would get a state of their own. That was of course a delusion.
    In the 1970’s, second-generation Moluccans decided to do something about the lack of progress in creating an independent Moluccan Republic. They hijacked 2 trains to put pressure on the Dutch government. Needless to say, it was a total failure. The Indonesian ambassador to the Netherlands dismissed the hijackers as madmen, and that was it.
    Other than the hijackings, I never read or heard any bad news about the Indonesians in the Netherlands.
    Regards. James

  9. Thanks for that, James. I knew there were a lot of Indonesians in Holland, but I just assumed they were Muslims.

  10. ” If you can think of any other countries this applies to, let us know in the comments.” -> BELGIUM and NETHERLANDS

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