Credit: nightlife-cityguide.com
Ah, Denmark. Beautiful, colourful houses in Nyhavn, high salaries with extortionately higher taxes, lovely Danes on their bikes screaming at tourists, and the liberal Christiania and its drug culture – which is the only other accepted culture. This is Denmark.
This is also exaggerating to emphasise a point, which happens when something like this occurs, making it natural to search for negatives in order to realise the necessity for improvement.
This month, Denmark passed a law that banned all covering of the face, highly influenced by an apparently normal fear of a piece of cloth with religious connotations. Two days after the big protest in inner Copenhagen, where Muslims and non-Muslim Danish women represented the greater part of demonstrators, a woman in a shopping centre in my town was assaulted and fined for it.
Witnesses said that a woman was wearing a Niqab while walking in the indoors centre, as a Danish lady stared her down and initiated a physical fight, where she tried to rip the Niqab off her. The woman resisted, but the niqab was practically off by the time the Danish woman stopped. She was asked by the authorities to either leave the premises or be fined for wearing a religious head-dress that was banned just two days prior. She chose to leave but was fined over £100 by mail, according to the Cph Post Online.
Denmark likes to present itself as a culturally diverse and open place, when the reality is, we are scared of anything we do not know. It is a natural instinct not exclusive to Danes, but it should be fought, as we no longer kill one another, nor can we legally commit crimes without prosecution. I don’t see why the fear must be endorsed rather than fought.
We receive obligation-free funds from the government to study, we have one of the ‘best’ healthcare systems in the world, and we have been named one of the happiest countries, but this seems to have made us arrogant despite our size, and we are exclusive and defensive – and the French are the only ones bearing the title of ‘rude towards foreigners’.
Speaking of the French – a wealthy French man has since offered to pay the fine which was given to the niqab-bearing woman in Hørsholm, Denmark – rude? I think not.
Obviously, it is not only Denmark that is stuck in an old-fashioned secular mentality – this medieval problem can be found all over the world, which is ironic, as humans began racial and ethnic mixing at the dawn of time. Today, I find that the people who aren’t mixed race or accepting and respectful of it, are the strange ones. The world will soon be all mixed, and the question ‘where are you from’ or ‘what are your values’ will not be asked as much.
Through hate, there can be found a stronghold in love, and that’s what has happened throughout time – where there is hate, there is love, and where there are haters, there are lovers. I believe in a future where there is a mutual understanding and agreement of situational, humane values – one of them being not to rip clothes, Niqab or otherwise, off one another, but so far, our generation has a lot of work cut out for us.
Welcome to my hectic, mixed world. I lack bias like it is a disease. Former Editor at Brig Newspaper, Psychology & English student, autoimmune.
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