Last Sunday morning, I saw a YouTube video claiming that 70,000 people had taken to the streets of Paris. The violence—semi-obscured by smoke and fire—was shocking, especially in light of the fact that it's spreading across Europe to Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium. The continent’s future is in peril. The unrest is no longer a reaction against subpar conditions in the French educational system, as evidenced by all the Palestinian flags flying amidst the smoke and fire of exploding Molotov Cocktails. For too long, Western Europe's been unable, or unwilling, to integrate its Muslim immigrants into their societies.
European nations are now looking at their streets and realizing they need a new way of dealing with the challenge mass immigration poses. Eastern European nations like Poland and Hungary have been much stricter on immigrants from the Middle East, and their streets are safe. The Western European liberals who’ve been calling those nations xenophobic, racist, and fascistic are having second thoughts now.
Europe could look to the Nordic nations for a new plan, but definitely not to Sweden. For years, Sweden (like the U.K.), has accepted cultural and religious diversity as part of its national identity. The result has been crime-ridden ghettos. Rape and homicide rates among those of Middle Eastern ancestry are far above those of the general Swedish population. Denmark, by contrast, has emphasized preserving its national character and culture by insisting immigrants assimilate, thus avoiding Sweden's ghetto and violent crime stats. A government's prime responsibility is to provide order to its citizens, not to conduct a social experiment aimed at accommodating the various religions and cultures of its migrants.
While Western European progressives point their fingers at the anti-immigrant “far-right xenophobes,” it's been the Danish Social Democrats—the party of the cradle-to-grave welfare state—who've spearheaded the hardest assimilation regime and the strongest crackdown against political Islam on the continent. One more surprise: this has made the Social Democrats even more popular.
At the heart of the Danish plan is the goal of erasing the existence of the “parallel societies” (Islamic ghettos) within its borders that have become so common in Western Europe. It sounds like a far-right approach, especially if one knows the details of how it's being carried out. But the Danish government has determined that these enclaves pose a danger to Denmark's existence because they're breeding grounds for festering resentment against their nation. Denmark’s Social Democrats have put to rest the 20-year-old assumption in Europe that controlling political Islam is the sole obsession of the reviled far right. It's a major development, backed up by empirical results, in the history of Europe.
It's important to draw a distinction between plain “Islam” and “political Islam.” Muslims practicing “Islam” adhere to the standard practices of their religion—attending the local mosque, praying five times a day, etc. “Political Islam” is synonymous with the word “Islamism,” a modern socio-political movement and ideology that asserts that public policy, law, and government should be strictly guided by Islamic principles. It’s this political ideology that Denmark, a nation with a strong survival instinct, wishes to rein in. In the U.K., however, progressives are displaying some suicidal tendencies which are making the future of the nation look dark.
Distinguishing between Islam and Islamism isn’t simple, as the foundational history of Islam intertwines religious faith with political and legal governance. Is a faith-based belief system that has its own legal code—”sharia law”—a religion or an ideology? The answer to those who've studied the matter is that Islam is both of them. Therefore, everyone should be free to criticize it, just as one might criticize communism, without being labeled a bigot. The problem is that Muslims don't handle criticism well. Muslims and their liberal allies rely heavily on calling critics of their ideology “Islamophobes.” The Muslim Brotherhood has successfully used that manufactured word—there's no similar word attached to Christianity—as a “heckler's veto”—a tool to give cover to its efforts to establish charities, schools, and lobbying groups (e.g. CAIR) with an underlying Islamist agenda.
The agenda of Islamism is to rule the world. Marxist-Leninists used to talk openly about their desire to do the same thing, but Islamists mostly keep it to themselves, so much of the world is unaware of their plans. Islamists have made some inroads into Europe so far. The Economist did a 2026 study revealing that 33 percent of the U.K.’s Muslims support Islamism—a minority, but still a worrisome statistic as their percentage of the total population continues to grow.
Denmark understands that it's impossible to provide a Nordic-style welfare system unless everyone plays by the same rules and buys into the nation's culture. The Danes felt the cracks in their society before their politicians did, but the politicians eventually took decisive—even radical—action, as expressed in the 2018 initiative, “One Denmark Without Parallel Societies—No Ghettos by 2030.” That wasn’t just empty political rhetoric. The government has demolished entire apartment blocks, sold others to private developers, and relocated residents to change the composition of the neighborhoods.
The integration initiative didn't stop there. It made sure all children became assimilated via a compulsory education program requiring them to learn to speak Danish and study “Danish values.” The message to parents: “You won't raise your children to be outsiders in our nation.” In 2018, the burka became illegal to wear in public. The government, ignoring foolish complaints that this was an attack on women, went on to restrict immigration to the highest earners, cut off almost all citizenship naturalizations, and ban hate preachers from entering the country. The fact that the U.K. allows these malignant figures within its borders is one reason I think of that nation as suicidal.
The above policies—which reflect the view that parallel societies aren’t a challenge to manage, but rather a threat to eliminate—have left the Danish far right with little cause for existence. Are they unfair to Muslims? Perhaps, but the stakes are too high to obsess over it. Denmark has obliterated two decades of mainstream political thought in Europe by proving that a progressive, humane welfare state can act forcefully against the resistance to assimilation and the growth of parallel societies and still emerge more stable. The lesson’s out in the open for Western Europe to see. The question is whether its leaders can summon the political will and courage to try a tough new approach that will meet heavy resistance.