Puzzling Danish Puzzlement, And Olivier Roy’s Preposterous Panacea

‘”Junaid Mann, a former Copenhagen gang member who went to the same boxing club as Mr. Hussein, said he did not know the gunman well but had crossed paths with him at the gym. “He was a criminal who went nuts,” he said, adding, “I don’t think this attack had anything to do with Islam.”

Mr. Mann, who is now studying law and works part time as a counselor to troubled Muslim youths, said Denmark and other European countries needed to defend, not stigmatize, Islam as only this can combat “street Islam,” a toxic jumble of half-digested lines from the Quran and political passions plucked from the Internet.

Olivier Roy, a leading French expert on Islam, has taken a similar line, telling Information, a Danish newspaper, that Denmark should counter wild strains of Islam imported from the Middle East by building up a “national version of Islam” through state funding for mosques and preachers, just as it funds Denmark’s state church.“

                                 — from an article on Danish authorities trying to “make sense” of the Muslim murderer in Copenhagen, and how to prevent similar atrocities

The Copenhagen murderer may have been a criminal, but so what? So are many people. Criminals who are non-Muslims do not, when they want to justify their lives and go straight, attack — this time in the certainty that they are doing good — certain targets. Muslims who want to go straight do not abandon violence; they direct their violence, they put it in the service of Islam, as they have been taught to do not only by this or that imam, but by everything in the texts of Islam with which they are familiar. And those texts do not change. Non-Muslim governments might try to hide those texts, or pretend that they can be interpreted away (and they are paying all kinds of Bright Young Muslim Reformers fabulous sums to do that, with results that are feeble and pointless and merely postpone what will eventually become the obvious, and necessary course).

The Copenhagen killer, the man who shot three dozen times into a Free Speech Forum where Lars Vilks was among the guests, and then at a synagogue where a Bat Mitzvah was in progress (can you imagine his delight, and that of so many other Muslims, had he managed to kill a few dozen Jewish children, as was done, to great Muslim Arab satisfaction, at Ma’alot, forty years ago?), was quite clear about what prompted his acts. He even wrote a letter of fealty to Al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State, the same Islamic State that had urged Muslims everywhere to attack non-Muslims, to be a Jihad Army of One if they couldn’t quite make it to the Caliphate.

Horrifying, and also amusing, is that the French sociologist Olivier Roy, who has an unbroken record of idiotic nostrums, is described in this article — on what basis? — as an “expert” (on what? as sanctified by whom?). and  quoted respectfully as suggesting that Denmark start a system of state-funded mosques which, Roy claims to believe, will be able to preach the Good and True Islam that doesn’t inculcate any hatred toward anyone.

How Roy thinks that relieving Muslims of the financial burden of supporting mosques, thereby making it easier for them to practice Islam, when everything should be done to make the practice of Islam into a burden, not a benefit to be supplied by the State, will make them more moderate is unclear. Or does he think that if the state pays for mosques, it can monitor every sermon? And even if it could monitor every sermon, so what? In the end, what’s in the Qur’an, and the Sunnah, remains as always, permanent and threatening, and there are a hundred ways for imams and Muslim worshippers to fool the Westerners who pay for their mosques.