Nadine Osman
A Turkish mosque near the Denmark-Germany border suffered an Islamophobic attack when someone wrote an insulting message on its walls, an official at the facility announced on January 23.
Hursit Tokay, the president of the Mosque Association, said that he left the Aabenraa Mosque at 6 pm, the following day when he arrived at around 11 am, he noticed insulting writings about the Qurʼān on the wall.
The mosque, which operates under the umbrella of the Danish Turkish Islamic Foundation, was partially closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He said mosque officials reported the incident to police and authorities opened an investigation and would examine surveillance cameras in the area. Tokay condemned the attack and said the writings were erased and no other damage was detected to the mosque.
In 2018, the European Union-funded report from a Turkish think-tank accused the Scandinavian country of widespread Islamophobia, with “exclusionary” political campaigns and “a normalisation of everyday discrimination of Muslims.”
European Islamophobia Report cited a law on day-care, the niqāb ban, and Denmark’s anti-ghetto legislation, as “discriminatory laws”, which have come about because of “widespread rhetoric on the supposed incompatibility of Islam to ‘Danishness’”.
According to a 2020 analysis by Danish researcher Brian Arly Jacobsen, an estimated 256,000 people in Denmark — 4.4 per cent of the population — were Muslim.
The report also referenced egregious examples of anti-Muslim political rhetoric, such as the slogan ‘Drop your headscarf and become a member of Denmark’, from the Danish People’s Party’s 2018 election campaign.
They also describe how Inger Støjberg, the former Danish Minister for Immigration and Integration, created fear among the population when she wrote a blogpost in the summer of 2018 claiming the Danish population was at risk when the Muslim minority was fasting during Ramadan.