It is Sunday evening and a small crowd has gathered outside Krudttønden, the cultural centre where the day before lone gunman Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein opened fire on a meeting to debate art, blasphemy and freedom of expression. In the bitter cold, people gather as close to the centre of the police boundary as they can. Bunches of flowers pile up on the pavement. A police helicopter clatters over nearby Nørrebro, where I live. The atmosphere is subdued but there is no sense of anger or panic. Danes are not given to histrionics.
My own reactions to the attacks are an equal measure of sadness and relief. I am particularly relieved the Swedish artist, Lars Vilks, who is presumed to be the main target of the first assault escaped unharmed. Although he has brought down the ire of Muslims for drawing a picture of a dog with the head of Muhammad in 2007, there is much more to Vilks than that. In September last year I met him on the shores of Kullaberg Nature Reserve in Sweden where he was busy repairing a massive installation he built from driftwood in 1980. Subsequently, he battled the Swedish authorities to stop them from demolishing it. Flanked by two armed bodyguards, Vilks was friendly and eager to chat. When I asked him if he regretted making fun of the prophet, he said he never had, and after the latest attempt on his life he repeated this assertion to the Danish media. He is a provocateur not an Islamophobe.
For an outsider – albeit one who has lived in the country for 22 years – one of the most curious things about Danish reactions to the terror attacks in Copenhagen is what was left unspoken. No one said, “How could this have happened here?” Outrage and horror were clearly visible on the faces of politicians, journalists and ordinary people but no one appeared to be taken by surprise.
Expecting an attack
The Danes have been expecting an attack of this nature since 2005 when Danish daily
Jyllands-Posten
printed satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that enraged Muslims across the globe, and since the
Charlie Hebdo
massacres there was a sense that the likelihood of such an assault had significantly increased. The fact that armed police officers were present at the cultural centre and the synagogue, where the second attack took place, shows how seriously the authorities took the threat and how much combating terror has become normalised.
On national television the previous evening, Søren Espersen, foreign affairs spokesman for the anti-immigrant party the Danish People’s Party, took care not to capitalise on the situation. In keeping with his colleagues from other parties he sought consensus. As well as being an attack on Denmark’s well-integrated Jewish community, politicians of the right and left agreed this was an assault on Danish democracy and the right to free expression, and these values must be upheld whatever the cost. Superficially at least, this gravitation towards the centre felt very similar to the consensual mood that existed at the height of the Muhammad cartoon crisis in 2006 when criticism of the government’s handling of the problem was almost non-existent and all political parties stood shoulder to shoulder against what was regarded as an external foreign threat.
However, on social media and in the commentary section of tabloids such as BT and Ekstra Bladet there is a markedly different tone. Readers are raging not just against terrorism or fundamentalism but Islam itself and the religion's quarter of a million adherents in Denmark. Many think Islam and the liberal secular society that dominates Danish culture and politics are incompatible. A couple of anonymous commentators even suggest Muslims should be forcibly removed. This is the other side of Danish liberal attitudes towards freedom of expression: hate speech as part of public debate. It is hard to gauge how representative these commentators are but since maverick politician, Mogens Glistrup, proposed sending all Muslims back to where they came from in the 1970s, the debate about Islam's role in this country has been a fertile subject for discussion. Although Glistrup's spectre still haunts the Danish immigration debate – he died in 2008 – the discussion has become more sophisticated if not always more conciliatory.
Luckily, other points of view are being aired as well. In the left-of-centre daily Politiken novelist Carsten Jensen levelled criticism against not just Danish People's Party's anti-immigration policies but also the Social Democrats, many of whom he accused of being just as xenophobic. He reminded readers that the gunman who attacked Krudttønden was not a Taliban suicide bomber and asked if Denmark had become a "self-radicalising" nation. During the last 12 years, he went on, Denmark has fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and against Islamic State , and yet the enemy when he came turned out to be a local man from Nørrebro in Copenhagen.
Fear of a backlash
In the same paper, leaders of the Muslim community express their fear of a backlash, although a violent response seems unlikely. In contrast to neighbouring Sweden, where arson attacks on mosques are not unusual, Denmark’s neo-Nazi movement is negligible. Instead, the focus in Copenhagen has been on how to protect the country’s 8,000 Jews. During the German occupation of the second World War, Danish resistance was not particularly effective but Danes are immensely proud that their countrymen managed to save almost the entire Jewish population from the gas chambers.
Appropriately, perhaps it is the synagogue which has become the chief focus of the vigils to commemorate the attacks. This is apt in another way as well. The English translation of Krudttønden is “powderkeg” and this is not a desirable metaphor for a nation which is just starting the process of healing the rift between Denmark’s large Muslim minority and the majority Danish culture. Brendan Sweeney lectures in politics at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad