Somethings rotten in the schools of Demark

JUST HOW BAD CAN IT GET? REAL BAD.

Bruce Bawer, FPM

One day around the beginning of October, a sixth-grade class in Ejerlykkeskolen, a school in Odense, Denmark, was supposed to watch a film. But five or six students made some kind of a disturbance. The details are unclear; the point is that, in one way or another, they disrupted the class and made it impossible for their classmates to view the film. Their teacher tried to control them, but without success. Finally she gave up and sent them down to the principal, a woman named Birgitte Sonsby.

Now, Sonsby, by all indications, is no ordinary school principal. According to Poul Erik Anderson – upon whose intensive coverage of this story, beginning with an October 18 article in Den Korte Avis, the present account is largely based – Sonsby has been named the best school principal in all of Denmark. She is the head of the Odense principals’ organization. She was recently selected over 353 other nominees for a leadership award presented by the city of Odense. And she has been officially commended for running a school in which students and teachers alike feel welcome. But on that day when those five or six kids were sent to her office to be disciplined, she was unable to do anything with them. When she tried to talk to them, they laughed in her face. Eventually she lost her temper. And she said something that she shouldn’t have: “I’m so damn tired of you Muslims destroying education!”

Before we proceed, a note on translation. The expletive Sonsby used, skide, can be translated in any number of ways, some of them a good deal stronger than others. I’ve chosen “damn,” but the level of intensity may be better captured by a more emphatic word, such as “goddamn,” “bloody,” or even (and this is, in fact, probably the closest equivalent) “fucking.” And the word I’ve translated as “destroying” was ødelægger – which could also be rendered as “ruining” or “spoiling,” or, somewhat more mildly, as “damaging.”

In any event, Sonsby apologized. But that wasn’t enough for the father of one of the disruptive boys, twelve-year-old Raacan Mansoor. The dad, Shaib Mansoor, reported Sonsby to the police for racism – a charge which, if sustained, could lose her her job. (Never mind that Islam isn’t a race: that ship has long since sailed.) Mansoor later withdrew his police complaint, but made it clear that he still wanted Sonsby fired.

After Mansoor’s accusation was reported, some people close to the situation defended Sonsby, testifying to her good qualities while acknowledging that she’d crossed a line. Others were quick to label her a racist and call for her head. Yet when you get right down to it, the only thing she’s guilty of, aside from using what may or may not be considered profanity, is voicing a forbidden truth.

The facts are these. For many years, the number of Muslim students in Danish schools has been steadily rising – and, as it has risen, the quality of everyday school life in Denmark has steadily eroded. In some schools, such as Ejerlykkeskolen, students with foreign backgrounds (the great majority of them Muslim) now outnumber native Danes – and the consequence of this has been a far higher level of disorder. Everyone in Denmark knows this.

Danish parents have pulled their kids out of certain public schools – and placed them in other public schools or in private schools – precisely because they don’t want to put them through what is increasingly becoming a nightmare. Andersen notes that when the municipality of Copenhagen redrew some of its school districts recently in order to place more kids from well-off Danish families in Blågård Skole, which is two-thirds non-Danish, the parents of no fewer than 45 percent of those kids pulled them out of the public school system and put them in private schools.

In short, to suggest that Muslims have destroyed – or ruined, or damaged – education in many Danish schools is only to state a fact.

On October 24, Andersen reported that in the wake of the charges against Sonsby, the head of her school board, Peter Julius, had written an op-ed for a local paper in which he spoke out against what he called the “tyranny of silence” surrounding the terrorizing of teachers and students in many schools by “maladjusted and ill-mannered bilingual students.” (“Bilingual students,” by the way, has become the Danish euphemism of choice for “Muslim students.”) These kids, Julius wrote, lack “the norms and values needed to succeed in a regular Danish school.” They call their teachers “whores” (ludere), harass and threaten them, and make routine accusations of racism (when, for example, a teacher tells them “to take their feet down from a sofa or a table”). Every day, it gets worse, inch by inch. “At some point the other children start to view them as role models.” And “every day our staff struggles to make room for good education.”

Andersen, to his credit, has not let go of the Sonsby story. On October 29, he reported that she isn’t the only one who’s “damn tired” of Muslim kids destroying education. So, it turns out, are the parents of many other students at Ejerslykkeskolen, whose anger over the “sabotaging” of their kids’ education predates the incident in the principal’s office. Indeed, in response to complaints by many of those parents, and threats by them to take their kids elsewhere, the school board, at a meeting on September 25 – days before Sonsby lost it – discussed the possibility of placing Danish and non-Danish students in separate classrooms. On October 12, the school board asked the city’s Board of Education for permission to do just that. That’s just how bad things have gotten.

Danish schools have been sliding down this slope, of course, for a long time. Andersen cites a report from 1992 – twenty years ago! – warning about the rise of precisely these problems in Danish schools. Frank in a way that European government reports about such matters can rarely afford to be nowadays, the report took immigrant-group parents to task for their “ignorance, indifference, and laziness,” and lamented their habit of “using/misusing Islam as the law over Danish law,” noting that Islam was “a constant obstacle to reasonable integration/assimilation.” Yes, Denmark has been a model for other European countries when it comes to reforming disastrous immigration and integration policies. But the current situation in Danish schools provides a helpful reminder that all these things are relative. Even the star of the class, in this case, is less than impressive. For all Denmark’s reforms, that country’s schools have deteriorated in exactly the ways that that 1992 report warned about. Today, to acknowledge out loud the state of affairs so bluntly outlined in that report twenty years ago is grounds for dismissal from a teaching job.

To read Sonsby’s story is to feel extraordinary empathy for her. She’s done a magnificent job in the face of challenges that most of the bureaucrats above her have tried to ignore for years – and the moment she slipped up, in the slightest of ways, some of them were quick to throw her to the wolves. But to read this story is also to reflect on that troublemaking kid’s father, Shaib Mansoor. Not only was he quick to run to the police screaming “racism.” On Friday, Danish state TV reported new complaints by Mansoor, who revealed that in a meeting with him after the Sonsby incident, a school official said that Muslim students do cause problems – Mansoor’s reaction to which is to complain “that schools distinguish between Muslim and Danish students” and that the problem in the schools (which Mansoor identifies not with kids like his son but with people like Sonsby) goes even higher up than the principal level. Mansoor pointed a finger at municipal officials.

Plainly, Masoor has learned to play Danish society like a maestro. His ranting obscures the fact that, as Andersen points out, the kind of behavior that pushed Sonsby over the line would never be tolerated for an instant in most schools in the Muslim world. In such schools, respect is all, and an unruly kid risks corporal punishment. If a typical Muslim father in a Muslim society were to find out that his son acted up in class and received a good beating for it, he would, in all likelihood, accept it, probably even approve. Respect must be enforced.

But Denmark is another story. Danish values, Danish culture, Danish law, the Danish educational system: in the eyes of many a Muslim in Denmark, these things deserve no respect whatsoever. They’re simply there to be exploited, as effectively as possible, for whatever personal gain one can wring out of them. Those Muslim kids who dared to laugh in Sonsby’s face have been taught from infancy that someone like her – an infidel, a woman – is their inferior, deserving of nothing but contempt and abuse. “Some of these boys,” a teacher told Ekstrabladet the other day, “are brought up like little kings, and no woman – aside from their mother – is supposed to tell them anything.”

Certainly that’s the take-away from the behavior of Raacan Mansoor and his friends, and that of Shaib Mansoor, too – whose first instinct, instead of getting Raacan in line and showing some respect for the brat’s teachers, was to try to destroy Birgitte Sonsby’s life.

November 1, 2012 | 31 Comments »

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31 Comments / 31 Comments

  1. @ elki:

    I have receiced that e-mail a many times,sent by my dear, dear Christian friends.They cannot understand Jewish support of Obama. I tell the them neither can I.

  2. Spanish journalist recently said ‘Europe got rid of 6 million Jews and replaced them with 10 million Arabs.’ Unfortunately, we suffer at their punishment.

  3. What has become of the desendents of Thor-kill-the scull-splitter

    What become of the desendents of Thor-kill-the scull-splittler.

  4. A Sun News program recently described how extremist Muslims are advocating for all sorts of Sharia law-type things (these Imams say Islamic Canadians should not wear a poppy for Remembrance Day, that they should not promote Canada Day, that they should condemn all sorts of things which are accepted by “ordinary” Canadians.) The most troubling part, however, is that these sentiments are not “on the fringes” or marginalized. In fact some of these radical Imams have the backing of Canadian universities — they’re supported by the so-called Leftists. The radicals are also heading up Islamic schools, some with taxpayer support (talk about suicidal). Canada is only slightly behind that of Europe (in terms of islamification).

  5. Urgent ALERT! NON-MUSLIM SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE IN GREAT DANGER FROM MUSLIMS IN BRITAIN!

    Please help! END MUSLIM IMMIGRATION! PROTECT CHILDREN!

    British Schoolgirl’s Testimony – Muslims Threaten Children With Violence & Rape Outside School Daily http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO1yN-eKjmo

    Join/Support British Freedom! Britain’s last great hope! http://britishfreedom.org/

    Non-Muslims of the world unite! We must not go quietly into the night!
    NO Islamic conquest of our nations!
    NO SURRENDER EVER!

  6. Something on anti-Semitism in American campuses, by Mitchel Bard, executive director of AICE.

    http://blogs.jpost.com/content/facts-versus-fiction-regarding-campuses?utm_source=e-Newsletter%2C+%2318+%28October+31%29&utm_campaign=AICE+e-newsletter+%2318%3A+November+1+-+Special+Report+on+Anti-Semitism+Today&utm_medium=email

    In a new report from the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, “Israel and the Campus: The Real Story,” Jeff Dawson and I have documented that the atmosphere on campus is not as bad as advertised, but that serious problems remain, such as the repetition of libels that are eroding Israel’s image among students, and faculty who misuse their positions to push political agendas that reinforce messages critical of Israel.

    The most serious problem on campus is not from student activities, but from faculty.

    Though it is important to monitor and publicize academic malpractice, it is difficult to do anything about professors who abuse their positions for political purposes because they are allowed to hide behind the shield of academic freedom.

  7. yamit82 Said:

    What is it in the pathology of the Jew who insists on being where he clearly is not wanted and not welcome?

    Whether in the diaspora or in Eretz Yisroel the Jew is not wanted. Great evil is loose in the world. I dont believe that the Jews can do anything to change the mind of the rabidly insane. They are all buying into the lies like a pack of rabid dogs. There is no reasoning with the rabid animal. A patient with cancer attacks his own body with biology, chemicals and radiation in the hope that the cancer will die before he dies. He attempts to pre empt his own death.

  8. @ yamit82:
    yamit82 Said:

    What is it in the pathology of the Jew who insists on being where he clearly is not wanted and not welcome?

    May be SAMSON BLINDED them?

    I read your link “Be like the terrorists” (http://samsonblinded.org/blog/be-like-the-terrorists.htm).

    Israelis DO have a moral right to react to the terrorists even with terrorism, since it is the Arabs that started it because they cannot stand coexisting with the Jews as equals.

    I am not sure though it would be the most intelligent choice, considering the backlash of international hostility that would ensue – then again, it must be that part of myself which is scared of economic sanctions that is speaking.

    But I have started buying into the whole idea of more assertive action, allowing my brain to consider it.

  9. @ yamit82:
    dear yamit,

    just finished viewing visual message for all jews 1&2.
    very visual. very graphic. very thought provoking.
    to say that we are hated, would be indeed a very mild understatement.
    this hatered is indeed part of the genetic make up of the rest of the world. you CAN NOT reason with such a sentiment by showing how good we are, what advances we have brought to the world etc. yada yada yada…
    you might as well be talking to the wall…

    shoyin.
    so we agree that the whole world hates us.

    given the chance, there will be hordes of jew-haters that will attempt to, for once and for all, rid the earth of this people that is so hated.
    this seems to me as the backed to the wall with (unfortunately) nothing to lose moment in the history of the jewish people, where the samson option becomes not just a theory, but a fact (the yemenite looking rabbi in the video even mentioned 2/3 of the world population – will be gone!)

    this was the introduction, and now the question. to you yamit.
    it is not a challenging nor a ‘wise guy’ question and it is very genuine:

    not all jews are (to put it mildly)following halacha.
    should ‘the day of judgememnt’ come, (where the world bastards will have to answer for their crimes against the jews) what will happen to the ‘halachic jews’ and the ‘non halachic jews’?

  10. @ Bernard Ross:

    And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people:

    What is it in the pathology of the Jew who insists on being where he clearly is not wanted and not welcome?

    The more the Jew shows determination to stay in those countries the more he will be resented and hated and the reaction of those who oppose the

    Jew will evolve into a more virulent and violent reaction.

    The battle between Islam and Christianity for world hegemony is a war imposed on the Jew, since with have no goal of world hegemony or dominance

    it should not be our war, all we want is to be left alone by both Christians and Muslims.


    Visual Message for all Jews part 1


    Visual Message for all Jews part 2

  11. @ Bernard Ross:
    Bernard Ross Said:

    They have invited the snake into their home and now the snake is gobbling its dinner.

    Suckers for supper – thus spoke the snake.

    Bernard Ross Said:

    The Danish education system is merely reflecting the Danish nation. DUH??? It’s Islam stupid!!!

    At least, now we have the answer to the old question “What’s rotten in the state of Denmark”?

    It’s the stench of Islam.

  12. @ Yidvocate:
    Yidvocate, both your points are not only valid, but should also be part of the content of our anti-Islam campaign.

    But i am very much concerned with who is going to talk to the young ones.

    Evangelicals are a great ally of Israel, but if you have an Evangelical talking in public about, say, the merits of Israel, the young people listening to him might make unconscious associations of Israel with the conservatism of the speaker. And this conservatism is seen as a wrong by the youngster.

    We need people that are perceived by the youth as open-minded to talk about the barbarianism of Islam and the hypocricy of the Left.

    The best of products cannot be sold without good marketing and consideration for the mindset of the target market.

  13. @ dionissis mitropoulos:

    So how about a new strategy:

    1. Point out that there is no such thing as “Islamophobia”. A phobia is an irrational fear or loathing. Nothing irrational in fear and loathing of Islam unless you still think it’s the “religion of peace”. When the slightest perceived insult or slight results violent mobs and killings, well then, what’s the issue. Ever hear of Naziphobia?

    2. Point out the hippocracy of the enlightened Left’s support for gays and abortion and liberal values while at the same time supporting Islam that shares none of those values and is in fact diametrically antithetical to these core values.

    Hopefully the truth will prevail but I must confess I don’t have much faith.

  14. The Muslims, thanks to their leftist dupes in Academia and the Media and the entertainment industry, have managed to insert in the political correctness’ verbal apparatus the term “Islamophobia”, which makes criticism of Islam illegitimate enough for all practical purposes.

    The war for the hearts and minds of the American people (I disregard Europe, it’s already doomed) is fought in the Universities and in the popular culture (especially the movies and the TV shows, and the music industry).

    This is so because these institutions affect the mindset of youngsters, and it is those youngsters that will comprise the America of tomorrow.

    If it is deemed by the culture-makers (professors and artists mainly) that it is non-posh to be an “Islamophobic”, the young Americans will end up supporting the Palestinians and the Muslim Brotherhood against Israel. They will do so because they will be unconsciously influenced by their fear of being ridiculed and humiliated in their peer group, their fear of being thought of as “rednecks”, and since Madonna or Lady Gaga don’t like rednecks, the young ones would rather die than be considered as such.

    At young ages, the fear of ridicule is greater than the fear of death – I am talking about the western world.

    Regrettably, the response of people who are concerned with the ascendance of Islam in the West is to fight political correctness in its totality. I see quite often articles that attack the liberal use of the “Islamophobia” term by making innuendoes about the liberal attitude in abortions and homosexuality.

    The argument is something along those lines: “Look at those liberals, they are gay and also support the murder of babies. Therefore no one should take them seriously when they talk about Islamophobia”.

    The trouble is that these two issues (abortions and gay rights) have been already decided, as far as the outlook of young Americans is concerned: they are overwhelmingly pro-gay and pro-abortion.

    Therefore, fighting the “Islamophobia” charge by attacking the whole content of the political correctness comme il faut is a looser tactic.
    In fact, it reinforces the youngsters’ perceptions that those who are labeled as Islamophobes are indeed very conservative, since they reject something that the youngsters consider progressive – and conservatism at young ages counts as a sin.

    My policy prescription in the cognitive war against Islam?

    We need as many blacks, gay and feminist spokesmen we can get.

    Their criticism against Islam counts for more.

  15. The Danish education system is merely reflecting the Danish nation. DUH??? It’s Islam stupid!!! They have invited the snake into their home and now the snake is gobbling its dinner. A dunce cap awaits these nations in the corner. This is what the Scandinavians have been advocating for the Jews and so now they are becoming the canary in the coal mine. They will have to find ways to expel them or die. Apparently alcoholism and suicide are high in these northern enlightened countries.

  16. IQ and education:

    The bell curve: the authors gave the same IQ test to everyone. Those who scored higher usually were more successful in life, and those who scored lower usually were less successful.

    When they analyzed the data, Jews scored highest, and blacks lowest. The prediction from these results was that a society with many Jews would do better than a society with many blacks. When you compare the success of Jewish Israel, and American Jews, with any black nation on earth, the prediction seems valid.

    Enter the white liberals. They were horrified by this result, and immediately crucified the authors as “nazi racists”. That is because, if the average black does have a lower IQ, and is less likely to succeed, then Hitler, in some sense, was at least partially correct.

    So the liberals countered: there is no such thing as intelligence, and the IQ test measures nothing. All human beings are equally intelligent. All blacks are at least as intelligent as all whites, if not more so. They proposed: just give us enough money, and enough time, and we will prove our point.

    They were given the time and money, and here is the result: in the typical public school in Washington, D.C, the students are all black. There is a metal detector at the door, and an armed guard inside the school. Only 60% of the students graduate at all. The standardized test scores are abysmally low (the same as the IQ test). Yet, DC spends more per capita on its students than almost anywhere. And they pay their teachers more. The teachers are unionized. They cannot be rated, and they cannot be fired.

    And what do white parents do? They send their kids to private schools, and end up paying twice: once (out of their taxes) for the public schools they do not use, and once for the private schools (directly from their non-taxed income). Inevitably, out of fear, they never complain out loud.

    And what does President Obama and First-Lady Michelle do? They send their kids to a private school that charges $30,000 per year per kid, driving past many all black public schools on the way.

    Conclusion (watered-down): the liberals appear to be delusional, and are pursuing policies based on those delusions that will only hurt America and its future.

  17. @ the phoenix:

    It defies comprehension. How the progressive, liberal West can suicidally aid and abet, let alone join in common cause with a 7th century totalitarian creed that oppresses women, kills gays and declares genocide against the Jews. It’s just mind boggling. Defies all logic. One can only say its the hand of G-d.

    I take the premise that the Jews were selected by G-d to be His emissary to the peoples of the earth. We blew it. As a result Christianity and Islam (and other) religions were spawned due to our failure. We were and are persecuted for our failure to live up to our mandate to be a “light unto the nations” and that is the true source of antisemitism. The nations lash back at us because they remain in the dark and they know (on a spiritual level) that we are responsible for that darkness. The uncanny advance of Islamofascism is only the current manifestation of our failure and seems to be orchestrated by G-d in fulfillment of the end of time prophecies that seem to be upon us, when Ishmael and Esov will be gathered against Jerusalem.

  18. @ Yidvocate:
    dear yidvocate,
    i totally agree with you. furthermore, your comment can be applied to england, sweden, holland.
    hell!
    all of europe for that matter (as eloquently written by bruce bawer, in ‘while europe slept’)and soon, coming to a neighbourhood near you (u.s. , canada, australia, and sadly, very sadly israel too)

  19. If have no sympathy for the Danes. They tolerate the intolerably intolerant Muslims when they should be sending them packing back to their goat herds.

    Instead they commit cultural suicide preferring the culture of the savage over their hard fought civil liberties.