Press Release
Danish Parliament Enacts Forced Secularization of Children

On Monday, May 28, 2018, the last part of the Danish government's ghetto plan was transformed into political agreements across the Danish parliament. The result: forced institutionalization of one-year-old children for 25 hours a week to indoctrinate them in Danish democratic traditions and values, before they can even speak. It is the very same values that politicians are undermining, and now by threatening with financial punishment will force young children to accept. A political majority thus clearly states that: either you raise your children on democratic values voluntarily, or the government will ensure that the children are institutionalized from a very young age and receive the state-approved education. When you cannot convince the parents, you chase the children with compulsion.

Looking at Denmark's history of coercion and indoctrination of children from Greenland in the 1950s, it cannot be said that the experience with this is good.

Nevertheless, the colonial mentality shows its ugly face once again, when the political authority is unable to tolerate people with a different culture.

The latest totalitarian initiative comes in spite of the fact that several experts and researchers have warned against sending children younger than three years into daycare, because of the harmful effects it has on the children’s development socially, emotionally and mentally. Several experts point out that the excessive institutionalization of children can be a contributing factor to the increasing stress, narcissism and restlessness of adolescents as well as adults. It is precisely this harmful practice that is now forced on Muslim children in so-called "ghetto areas". It is worth noting that Denmark has the European record for hours children spend in daycare; but no commission has been instituted to investigate the impact of daycare on the well-being of children. On the other hand, it has been found important to set up a burka commission.

With the Imam-law’s restriction of "freedom of expression", entry ban, niqab ban, and in continuation of the total efforts against "social control", "radicalization", as well as restrictions on private schools; the racist ghetto plan is attempting to lay a suffocating ring around Muslims in the country, with state intervention in all parts of their lives, from cradle to grave.

Force, thought control and discriminatory laws are the only tools of the anti-Islamic politicians! Just as the bottom was hit with the niqab ban, the politicians dug the hole deeper and trampled the remains of the values of freedom further down in the dirt.

Innocent children do not need state-authorized forced schooling. It is the Danish politicians who lack all kinds of human decency and sound values. The Minister of Social Affairs claims that consideration for the children is the most important, and they must therefore be forced into institutions. The argument is absurd in itself, but the political hypocrisy is once again apparent when looking at how rejected refugee children are treated with inhuman cynicism in today's Denmark.

History will award this country's obsessive politicians the credit for the abolition of Danish democracy and for giving the liberal ideology of freedom the death stroke in an Islamophobic hysteria. The hopeless struggle against Islamic upbringing is merely an expression of the weaknesses of Western ideals and the desperation of the politicians.

It is time that politicians realize that the Muslims in Denmark will never abandon their Islamic identity, and not at all for the benefit of a Western culture in free fall. The values of Islam are not up for negotiation; and the harder they try to push, the firmer we will hold on!

Just as Muslims unite to find strength in their Islam in the blessed month of Ramadan, the Muslims will unite to stand firmly on every part of Islam, no matter how much the hateful will despise it.

Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir in Scandinavia