Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The Eternal Victim

“There is no doubt that the Muslim culture in general is unhealthy to grow up in.”

I reported last year on the Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels, who until 2008 worked at a secure youth institution Sønderbro in Copenhagen. He later wrote a book, Blandt Kriminelle Muslimer (“Amongst Criminal Muslims”), about his experiences dealing with young Muslim criminals in the Danish justice system.

Nicolai was recently interviewed at length by the Finnish Homma Forum about cultural enrichment in Denmark and other parts of Europe. The interview was in English, so no translation is required:

Nicolai, can you give a short version of your life story?

I was born in 1976 and grew up far out in the countryside in Denmark. During my studies in Copenhagen I worked as a social worker with teenagers. I also worked as a semi-professional rock musician for a couple of years while studying psychology at the university. I have worked with troubled youngsters all my adult life. It has always been very easy for me to like them, connect to them and help them. I have developed new kinds of therapies, especially for Muslims, and my methods have been mentioned positively in several professional magazines, newspapers and on the radio.

When did your interest in integration and Islam start?

Ten years ago we had a horrible case in Denmark. Four young Muslim boys dragged a young woman by her hair all through the biggest shopping street — Strøget — in Copenhagen and tried to rape her. Even though she was screaming and it was clear that something was terribly wrong, nobody did anything to stop it. Imagine that: a young woman being dragged through the most busy street in Denmark — with lots of bystanders — and nobody tries to stop it. Not actively trying to stop a bad thing happening — even if you risk that your colleagues, friends or family think critically about you or you may get yourself a blue eye — is probably the worst thing one can do to one’s own self-confidence, personal ethics and humanistic values. If we are only willing to help the weak when it is without any risk for ourselves, we are useless cowards. Today this help is not so often physical — even though all men should learn to fight, either in martial arts or in the territorial army — but intellectual. Writing letters to newspapers, blogs, telling one’s honest thoughts when the talk on Islam or immigration starts in the lunch break at work — all this is very helpful. Being passive while women are treated bad and failed integration threatens to drag down our cultural values and welfare societies is failing to live up to our responsibility as humans. Especially men should take their role as protector of women very seriously.

Anyway, as most other Danish, I was shocked about the rape story. Both the brutality and the fact that nobody helped that poor woman was devastating to me. Before this incident my ears were closed to those who criticized Islam and Muslim immigration but from then on I started listening with a more serious attitude. At that time I was still sure that successful integration was just a matter of time and that social injustice was the main responsible for the ethnic tensions. I was also too nervous about getting criticized to share my worries with others. Today things are different: I no longer vote for the Social Democrats. I also no longer care what people think of my opinions about Muslim culture etc. I am also no longer passive — I feel a responsibility for defending suppressed Muslim women, our freedoms and for showing people that we can say exactly what we think about Islam and Muslim immigration.

By the way, just as a footnote: it accidentally turned out that three of these four Muslim boys were sentenced to live for a period at the institution where I worked at that time. Confused, insecure young men with the too typical Muslim male chauvinistic attitude and strong victim mentality and no real values in life except getting as much as they could with as little effort as possible.

Tell us about your conflict with the municipality of Copenhagen.
- - - - - - - - -
Well, after working for several years with both Danish and Muslim children and teenagers, it was very clear to me that there are certain very deep psychological differences between these two cultures. These differences are without doubt so deep that Muslims will have to leave many of their core values behind if they are to integrate in our societies and feel Danish, Finnish, German, etc.

As a psychologist with special knowledge about criminality and foreigners I was invited by Copenhagen’s mayor of integration to participate in a conference on integration at the city hall. The discussion was about criminal foreigners, foreigners and integration, foreigners and terror, foreigners and parallel societies, etc. I got irritated about the way the discussion went, because everybody generalized all foreigners as if they came from the same culture. I argued that the main part of the problematic foreigners have Muslim background and that we should discuss the meaning of culture when trying to find causes and solutions. This was far too strong for both the mayor and most of the people attending the conference. Another discussion at the conference was that we should try to help criminal foreigners find peace in their life by inviting them to become more religious. Here I reminded the mayor and the others about the many passages in the Quran that actually bid Muslims to do criminal acts — and that several Mosques in Copenhagen are known to be very extremist. Again this was more than the politicians could handle.

I have later debated with the mayor of Copenhagen on my blog “The Cultural Cleft” on Jyllands-Posten. I started the debate because he promised to pay for the Muslims’ religious festivals if they helped him get reelected at the local elections on November 17th. He — by the way — did not get reelected. The new mayor, Klaus Bondam, is unfortunately an even worse choice. Since he is a homosexual and wears makeup, I guess he will have a hard time communicating with the Muslim society.

Why is it so difficult to have a dialogue with Muslims about the high crime rate and integration problems?

The reason has to do with cultural psychology. In Muslim culture people see their lives mainly as controlled by outside factors — Islam, Allah, the imam, the father of the family, cultural norms and traditions, society, and — when they experience problems — especially non-Muslims and non-Muslim authorities. In our Western culture, it is in many ways the opposite. Here we see ourselves as being in control of our own life. We see our motivation, view on things, way of thinking, communicating and acting as the most important factors deciding our lives. This is why we have so many psychologists and therapists, a great number of social sciences, tons of self help books, etc. — all of which are aimed at our inner life and build on the view that we create and change our own life ourselves. You do not have all these things and also not this view in Muslim culture. If you have a problem as a Muslim, you are not raised to think, “What am I doing wrong since I always end up in trouble?” In the Muslim culture you look outside yourself: “Who did this to me or my life?”

With this way of thinking you always see ourselves as the victim and somebody or something outside yourself as the cause of your problems. Bernard Lewis, the famous professor in Islamic history, has observed the same cultural difference. In his words Westerners asks themselves, “What did I do wrong?” and Muslims asks, “Who did this to me?”

Therefore many Muslims do not think that they create the problems. And talking about a person’s problems with somebody who thinks that everything is everybody else’s fault is not easy…

Does the upbringing have anything to do with criminal behavior?

Upbringing has everything to do with criminal behavior. Well brought up people in general have good self confidence, a generally good mood and constructive ways of solving their problems — and they find it easy to love and be useful for themselves and others.

As an experienced professional psychologist within the field I can tell you that most criminals have a lot of anger, insecurity and very little ability to feel empathy. An important question is of course: why are many Muslims brought up in a way that makes them criminal?

Let me answer that question with an analogy. Some families are healthy for children to grow up in. They develop a sense of self-responsibility, they develop empathy and learn that destructive emotions such as anger, jealousy, revenge, etc. are negative and should be controlled and dealt with. Some families are unhealthy for children to grow up in: they become inflexible and unable to adjust to social rules, they become careless of others and themselves, etc. In this way all families have their own culture, their own emotional and cultural environment, which shapes the people growing up in it. Just as families have different cultures and can be healthy or unhealthy for people’s development, so can whole cultures.

There is no doubt that the Muslim culture in general is unhealthy to grow up in. Its admiration of anger, its suppression of female qualities (in psychology known as “femina”), its very insecure relationship to honor, its victim mentality and its lack of focus on individual reflection on the connection between one’s own behavior and one’s own problems very easily create immature and aggressive individuals with low self confidence.

Are your professional observations seen as political instead of sheer observations of a professional psychologist?

Of course I and also my book have been criticized. As you can hear, I say things straight out. But those who criticize me have either no experience with working professionally with Muslims or are Muslims themselves. When I do lectures for school teachers and social workers on schools with many Muslims, they all agree with me. At those occasions it is not at all a question of whether I am right or wrong — because they have exactly the same observations as I do. At those lectures we go directly to the solutions. The Danish magazine for professional Danish psychologists, PsykologNyt, recently reviewed my book. The review was very positive, stating that it is “a provoking eye-opener, convincing and well founded with many concrete examples”. Several national newspapers also wrote positively about the book and even our most famous Muslim politician, Naser Khader, who has himself written a book on Muslim culture, was very favorably disposed. Khader states that “the professional expertise that Nicolai Sennels has is exceptional and the clear examples in his book make it a must-read for all teachers and social workers”. Among people who have experience with Muslims, I am clearly seen as a experienced professional psychologist.

Why aren’t the media and academia reacting? Is it because those journalists and academics who have so to speak invested in appeasement would be risking their careers? After all, if we go back to assimilation, plenty of people within the media and universities with multicultural careers would face a personal disaster?

The main creed in academic circles is that cause and effect does not work for Muslims. With cause and effect I mean that people create their own lives. In Academic circles you are taught that the fate of poor and anti-social people are in the hands of the rest of us. But it is completely clear that Muslims create their own problems by not integrating, not learning Danish, not educating their children, not allowing their women normal human rights, not working, not opening up to our Western culture, etc. Especially their oppression of female qualities is very harmful to both their women, men, children, and their ability to build transparent, free, democratic and humanistic societies. The only case where cause and effect works — according to academics — is when rich people are depressed or are unsuccessful: that is their own fault and serves them right… Ridiculous. If we are not willing to show people their own part of the problems they have, how are we to teach them how to solve them?

Britain and Sweden appear to be competing for being the European leader in hiding problems under the carpet. Sometimes Denmark is considered to be some kind of forerunner in more free debate. But this image of Denmark may not be that accurate — you still have Tøger Seidenfaden and DR. And has so much changed in Danish politics during last years, in spite of all the talk?

Denmark is world famous for our open debate on Islam and Muslim immigration. And we surely deserve the attention. Our newspapers are full of readers’ letters criticizing Islam and the failed immigration of Muslims. It is simply a part of Danish culture to speak out and to ridicule those who get angry and lose face when criticized. Of course we have people not realizing the great danger of Islam and of having ethnic tensions resulting from failed immigration of Muslims. There is no doubt that extreme leftist newspapers such as Tøger Seidenfaden’s Politiken would lose readers — and thereby money — if they started being realistic about the problems. But they are already losing readers and their only two parties, Enhedslisten and De Radikale Venstre, are on their way out the parliament’s drain. The normal woman and man of the street sees very clearly what is happening to our countries. They meet the aggressive Muslims in discos, in their children’s schools, in the subway, etc. Most important is that people talk together about it. For every person who just mentions a bit about their worries about Muslim immigration at work, for example, will help several of their colleagues to think and talk more freely about the subject at work, family dinners, etc.

What would be the most important change you would make in handling Muslim immigrants, given that you could decide?

Inviting people from a completely different culture to live in our countries is the biggest sociological experiment in history of mankind and it is clearly turning out bad. Making deep changes in the demographics of a whole continent is very hazardous. Immigrants who do not want to assimilate — meaning taking our culture to their heart and becoming Westerners — should not be here. We have to find places on our planet where such people can live without the pressure of having to integrate and where their surroundings do not suffer from their anti-social behavior, religious fanaticism and lack of contribution to our economy.

On internet forums with a critical tilt on immigration, the cultural appeasements given to Muslims are considered exactly the 180 degrees wrong policy. Especially those Danes and Swedes who have lived at close proximity to Muslim neighborhoods state that the appeasements just make Muslims even more demanding. Could it be seen that these appeasements have an effect on criminality? Is all appeasement bad, or are there any bright spots?

There is no doubt that appeasement makes Muslims feel stronger and feel that they are right. It also makes us look weak in their eyes. Their victim mentality grows immensely every time the appeasers open their mouth. You see, appeasement is a Western tradition. If we make a compromise or are nice to somebody, we naturally expect that they feel thankfulness and will do their best to solve their part of the problem. Muslims think differently: in their culture it is the dog that barks the loudest that becomes the boss.

In our culture we think that only small dogs bark — big dogs do not have to, because they are big and do what they want. When they bark we think that they are immature and need a hand. When we just appease and compromise our own values, they think we are weak and vulnerable and the feeling of needing to adjust to our culture gets smaller. Appeasement politics is a deadly result of not understanding this crucial difference between Western and Muslim culture.

The worst thing is that the appeasers and the politically correct crowd has managed to scare a lot of people not to speak their opinion out loud. People are afraid of being called a racist or that others think bad about them. My advice is: Don’t care! If you saw a scared girl being dragged by the hair by four boys — would you try to stop them? If you are seriously worried about Islam and Muslim immigration — would you tell it?

Thank you for your effort, Nicolai, and we wish you all the best.

Thank you, and thank you for yourselves for the interest!


Hat tip: Steen.

14 comments:

Chechar said...

@ “There is no doubt that the Muslim culture in general is unhealthy to grow up in.”

Very unhealthy, actually! I’ll repost here excerpts the article If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I'll Finally be Loved by Lloyd deMause. It conveys the main hypothesis of my Quetzalcoatl book: that poor childrearing produces inferior “psychoclasses”, i.e., poorly integrated people from the psychological viewpoint. Although the article focuses on the Palestinians, similar childrearing methods are practiced throughout the Islamic world. Here there are the excerpts:

“A recent study published in the scholarly journal Child Abuse and Neglect reported on a careful survey of 652 Palestinian undergraduates about their memories of being sexually abused by a family member, a relative or a stranger. The study concluded that […]. The figures are so much higher than anything I have found in my extensive research […]. The report also finds "significantly higher levels of psychoticism, hostility, anxiety, somatization, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, depression, obsessive-compulsiveness and psychological distress" in those reporting sexual abuse. […] One ex-PLO terrorists, Walid Shoebat, reported that "Palestine is a strange society. Homosexuality is forbidden, but if you're the penetrator, not the penetrated, it's okay... Once, on a hiking trip, I saw a line of shepherd boys waiting for their turn to sodomize a five-year-old boy. It was unbelievable... teenage boys prey upon younger children; older male relatives prey upon pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls." Although Shoebat says "most Arabs and Muslims will deny that this is so," my own research confirms that it is widespread in the Islamic nations of the Middle East. Granqvist reports that most infants in Palestine are tightly swaddled during their first six months. The physical battering of both girls and boys from birth for small misdemeanors is widespread throughout Muslim societies. Visitors to families report on the "slapping, striking and thrashing" of children. A typical report of Islamic cultures says, "A large number of children face some form of physical abuse, from infanticide and abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking, burning, cutting, poisoning, holding underwater or giving drugs or alcohol, or violent acts like punching, kicking, biting, choking, beating, shooting, or stabbing." Islamic schools regularly practice severe corporal punishment. "Honor killings" of girls who are blamed for their own and others' sexual abuse are said to be widespread in Palestine. All this routine child abuse is said by most academic scholars to have no effect upon the adults in the society. […] In other words, if a terrorist is able to function at all, even if they are suicidal and homicidal, they are "normal". […] Fortunately, there are two psychohistorians in addition to myself who have found from extensive research exactly the opposite.”

Listen to an audio version of this article, it’s available here!

Croc8 said...

Way to go GoV. I appreciate your posting eloquent articles such as this one.

You have clearly chosen the path not often taken by other bloggers, and in so doing allowed a treasure trove of clear thinking to be revealed.

Thanks again for your diligence.

thll said...

With respect, isn't Mr Sennels doing what the Muslims are themselves doing? Muslims put the responsibility for their predicament on others, Mr Sennels puts it on Islam and child-rearing practices.

The harsh reality is that Muslims are themselves responsible for how they are. Religion and indeed child rearing practices are an expression of the soul of a people - Islam is psychotic because it is an expression of a psychotic people.

The problem isn't so much Islam as the people that spawned it and that now 'nurture' it.

Pointing the finger at Islam is like pointing the finger at the gun a murderer used to kill his victim.

Chechar said...

@ “The harsh reality is that Muslims are themselves responsible for how they are.” – thll

If you listen to the above audio, you’ll see that the adolescents who tried to rape the Danish girl must surely have had extremely serious family issues. (On the other hand, I wouldn’t even blame these young Muslims, but the traitor Europeans who brought them there: they are even more evil than the rapists themselves.)

spackle said...

Excellent piece. This one goes in my file.

In Hoc Signo Vinces† said...

Chechar,

Your theory is in danger of reading like an apology for the enrichers and islam. It is not a new theory it can easily be found in popular culture - in Night at the Museum (2006) the Ben Stiller character psychoanalises Attila The Hun.

As for Nicolai Sennels let us be honest this young man did not grow up in some social or political vacum, I welcome the fact that he now has good sense but his embarrassment leaps from the page.

Throughout history rape has been used as an act of war and colonisation.

Chechar said...

4Symbols,

I doubt that those who have actually listened to the audio of deMause’s views on childrearing in Palestine see it as an apology. If you prefer a text, see this article by psychohistorian Robert Godwin. He’s certainly no “apologist” and, unlike deMause, he doesn’t focus on Palestinian childrearing methods, but on the Muslims’ childrearing methods in general.

Cheers,

Chechar.

Papa Whiskey said...

... there are certain very deep psychological differences between these two cultures. These differences are without doubt so deep that Muslims will have to leave many of their core values behind if they are to integrate in our societies and feel Danish, Finnish, German, etc.

Which they are never going to do this side of the grave. As Organization of the Islamic Conference Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said in a speech at Columbia University on Sept. 18, 2008:

The Muslim Ummah, means the 'community of the faithful'. It is a unique bond that has no similar example under any other political or religious system in the world. It is a belonging to ideals which bring Muslims together in an eternal brotherhood lock which transcends all other consideration of allegiance or loyalties or barriers of nationhood, ethnicity, geography or language.

Anonymous said...

Papa Whiskey, would you, by any chance, have a link to a transcript of this address of Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu at Columbia University ?

All I could find were podcasts.

Thanks in advance.

Chechar said...

For people who still believe that all Muslims love their offspring as we Westerners usually do, I’d like to add that this is a much common liberal, post-modern mistake. It reminds me some words by Nicole Kidman in Australia, where Kidman says that no (Australian aboriginal) mother would abandon her child, or that no mother would repudiate her child. This is a far more serious Hollywood sin than Avatar since Australia purportedly deals with real, historical events.

In real history, Australian aboriginals have behaved in most heinous, infanticidal ways toward their children. Liberals, post-moderns cultural relativists, multiculturalists and especially West-haters are but projecting their own psychogenic structure onto more primitive psychoclasses (as I have been trying to show in other threads). In other words, they idealize non-Western childrearing methods, whether Muslim or not.

I the audio about Palestinian childrearing I linked above, some Palestinian mothers are quoted stating that they would love to see their children death (in martyrdom). As Robert Godwin put it:

“It is very difficult for us to comprehend a society that, instead of mourning the death of a child, celebrates it. The father of the Tel Aviv disco bomber, who killed more than twenty teenagers, said that he was ‘extremely happy when I heard that my son is the one who did this operation. I hope I have many sons to carry out the same act.’ Likewise, the mother of the Israeli pizza restaurant bomber claimed that this was the ‘greatest gift’ a son could bestow upon his mother. These martyrs and their parents ‘see Jihad as a profitable bargain, selling their lives to Allah’ to get paradise in return. There is simply nothing in our society remotely analogous to treating a funeral like a wedding, or offering the parents of a dead child congratulations instead of condolences.

What kind of love is it that rejoices at a child's death? In fact, we should call this parental attitude what it is: hatred, which, if deMause is correct, is simply emblematic of the kind of care the suicide bombers must have received as children. If, as the cliche goes, Islam has been 'hijacked,' then these parents have taken over the plane.”

4th and last post on this thread.

Sean O'Brian said...

Great post.

I just wanted to make one small point to compliment Chechar's which is that killing your children is not as 'unnatural' as might be supposed. The reason our civillisation avoided child sacrifice was because of specific prohibitions in the OT.

Abortion flourished openly in the West only after Christianity had become severely weakened. It is one of the consequences of our regression to paganism, as I'm sure that Czech cardinal would agree.

In Nazi Germany abortion was illegal for Ayrans but legal for everyone else. That would seem to be the Muslim attitude as well insofar as they never partake of abortion but never object to the practice either.

Don Sharpe said...

It could be a daily collection of news items, 'Today's Misguided Muslim Victims', starting with the Nova Scotia woman claiming she was banned from entering the U.S. because of her 'faith'.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/nova-scotia/story/2010/01/06/ns-muslim-flight-profile.html

The fact that she had a one-way ticket, no mortgage, was going to visit her new husband in Ohio, etc. raised all sorts of red flags at U.S. Customs.

Over 450 very revealing comments at the CBC story link above. Canadians are losing patience for this false-victim mentality. I only hope our Canadian MP's doesn't embarrass themselves attempting to dictate terms to the U.S. border agency in a spasm of appeasement.

S said...

Chechar says
""What kind of love is it that rejoices at a child's death?""


*****
The love of a parent who knows islam, since there is no guarantee of paradise unless one dies fighting in the cause of allah, but if they do that, then they are also granted the right of entry to paradise for anyone they want. That means when a muslim dies for allah he can bring his whole family into paradise! What a great son!
Kindof like talking your daughter into marrying a very rich guy that she hates so that she will take financial care of the entire family (and you) forever. Only in a religious way. What a great daughter. And a great parent, ensuring that the daughter is taken care of, the grandkids and the entire family! Such a small sacrifice. After all time on earth is short and just a preparation for heaven.
And if everyone gets into heaven because of your actions, what better thing can you do while on earth?
Plus you get all those virgins.
****

That's the muslim mindset. Do we want people that think that way living near us?

Nicolai Sennels said...

Other articles with Nicolai Sennels:

# EuropeNews “Integration of Muslims in Western societies is not possible”: http://europenews.dk/en/node/21789

# The German Review of Books: The one thing Muslim immigrants fear is being deported: http://www.germanbookreview.com/the-one-thing-muslim-immigrants-fear-is-being-deported/

# Interview til Hommaforum: An interview with Nicolai Sennels: http://hommaforum.org/index.php/topic,19459.msg271993.html#msg271993

# Artikel i New English Review: Muslims and Westerners: The psychological differences: http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/63122/sec_id/63122

# Interview i FrontPageMagazine: Among Criminal Muslims: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/05/05/among-criminal-muslims/