The following article by the Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels was originally posted at the New English Review. It has been republished here with the permission of the author.
Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences
by Nicolai SennelsIntroduction by Nancy Kobrin, author of The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing[1]When I first read about Nicolai Sennels’ work concerning therapy, which he had conducted with criminal Muslims in Denmark, I knew that it would be groundbreaking. I hope that you the reader will listen closely to what he has to say.
I also had the opportunity to conduct prison interviews of Muslim detainees, which were not interrogations. Minneapolis has the largest diaspora of Somali Muslims outside of Mogadishu, and there was an overload in the county jail. I was trying to decide if I wanted to draw up a research project. Pressured for time and with too many other responsibilities plus receiving a death threat during one of the interviews, I decided against it.
Like Sennels, I came away with a similar sense that Western law enforcement and the general public did not understand why there was so much crime in the Muslim population. And why there has been this problem of jail house converts to Islam who then become radicalized through contact with other criminal Muslims during incarceration.
Islam is the perfect religion to give justification for those who feel under attack and to maintain the eternal “victim” fantasy. Islam is also “higher” than Christianity because it comes last in co-opting the revelations of Sinai and the New Testament. What a perfect receptacle for projecting hatred. Islam incites, encourages and permits hatred of the Jew and Jihad. It’s perfect for a fragile personality that has the need to hate and the need to have an enemy. There are billions of people out there who share those sentiments and that profile. As an underdog religion, Islam provides great mass appeal, which even Eric Hoffer, the author of
The True Believer, noted in 1951. It should come as no surprise that its numbers are growing. If one has a grievance, Islam will take care of it.
Sennels adeptly outlines the key problems of why Muslims are not able to integrate into Western culture. What he doesn’t say, I shall name. We are dealing with nothing more than paranoia. Sennels stresses that the West must set boundaries because otherwise they will kill you. This kind of rage is malignant borderline behavior as in serial killing. We must come to understand such politically incorrect observations as Sennels does in order to connect the dots concerning criminal Muslims even though it is brutal.
Happy well-adjusted children do not become suicide bombers nor do they become criminals. Let us choose to know what we are dealing with rather than bury our heads in sand out of terror. Let us meet the challenge straight on as Sennels has. If the Swedes had intellectual fortitude, Nicolai Sennels, the Dane, should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for standing up and proclaiming that the “Emperor Has No Clothes.” But then again, that is a Danish tale and the Swedes are left with Ingmar Bergman’s drama. Need I say more?
BackgroundFebruary 27th 2008. On a cold and windy Wednesday (for cyclists like myself), I took a deep breath, grabbed the microphone and did something that changed my life. In front of the Copenhagen Mayor’s Integration and Social Services Office there were gathered several journalists, a faithful Muslim musician from the famous MTV-band ‘Outlandish,’ dozens of Imams and Muslim spokesmen and a couple of hundred social workers with Muslim and Danish backgrounds. I began to say what everybody already knew, but, what nobody either wanted or dared to say: that those who are referred to as foreign criminals, religious extremists, or terrorists in the making and who are the cause of lawless parallel societies (what the conference “Diversity and Safety in the City” was about) are
all Muslim. I argued that we should stop talking about “criminal
foreigners“ and start using the more precise term, “criminal
Muslims.“ As a psychologist, having had more than a hundred Muslim clients, I told them that politicians and professional social workers need to understand the cultural and religious backgrounds of criminal foreigners. That is, if we want to come up with, at least, somewhat effective and targeted plans on how to reduce the social unrest, anti-democratic religious movements, the violent and anti-social forces among foreigners.
I was met with strong criticism from all sides and no support at all!
Just as most soldiers in the front lines die in the first attack, many of those who attacked political correctness have experienced negative professional or social consequences. I was no exception. The Mayor of Social Services was clear. I should either refrain from using stigmatizing expressions or find myself another job. Actually I was trying to stop the so-called stigmatization of all the non-Muslim immigrants by focusing on the one group that creates all the problems. But you can’t fight City Hall. Our biggest national newspapers and radio news programs got hold of the story and the mayor was strongly criticized by the media experts on free speech and by the Danish blog-sphere. For about a month there was not a day when my name was
not in one or more newspapers and the fighters for free speech took another round. I was no longer an anonymous psychologist. My name was known by everybody who read newspapers in Denmark and especially Islam-critical blogs on the internet put me in the spotlight.
Instead of keeping my mouth shut, I decided to write a book about my experiences with Muslims based on hundreds of therapy sessions. The whole circus that had happened concerning my case had already shown the necessity of breaking the taboos around criminal Muslims. Further, a serious discussion about the relationship between the Muslim culture and criminal, antisocial behavior is, indeed, very much needed. I managed to negotiate a deal that gave me four months severance pay. I am probably the first psychologist in Copenhagen who was offered $20,000 dollars for quitting his job voluntarily. I guess they just wanted to get rid of me, ASAP. I found a well-paying job as a Military psychologist doing psychological screening of soldiers returning from the war in Afghanistan. I also started writing my book, in which I describe a psychological profile of the Muslim culture. The title of the book is Among
Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s Experiences from the Copenhagen Municipality. (Free Press Society, 2009).
After having consulted with 150 young Muslim clients in therapy and 100 Danish clients (who, on average, shared the same age and social background as their Muslim inmates), my findings were that the Muslims’ cultural and religious experiences played a central role in their psychological development and criminal behavior. “Criminal foreigners” is not just a generalizing and imprecise term. It is unfair to non-Muslim foreigners and generally misleading.
President Barack Hussein Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was unaware of the terror plot that was just foiled in Britain. His ignorance of the recent arrests in England and Wales was revealed when he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer on ABC News yesterday. His staff had not briefed him on what had just happened.
Below is a very peculiar news story from the 
The 
The prosecutor apparently did not consider it necessary to prepare for the trial. No, he said, he had no questions for the defendant. The tape recording of her comments, the basis for the charge against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, 39, he had only heard “in excerpts.” On this tape, covertly recorded by a reporter in the fall of 2009, can be heard how Sabaditsch-Wolff — during her seminar “the Fundamentals of Islam” — says to a participant, among other things,: “Cardinals rape in spite of their religion. Muslims rape because of their religion.” Sponsor of the seminar: the Freedom Education Institute. A charge was laid after a report appeared in the weekly magazine, NEWS. 
A Queens Park father of seven banned as a taxi driver because of his infringement-riddled traffic record has been thrown a lifeline by the Supreme Court that could have him back behind the wheel.