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| Grimhøj Mosque, Aarhus, Denmark [Image Source] |
Jewish community radio station shuts down in wake of terror attacks | Radio Shalom advised by PET to take a break while Jews across Europe demand more protection | The Copenhagen Post | February 17, 2015 | Ray Weaver | For the first time in the station’s history, Radio Shalom did not broadcast its usual blend of programs about Jewish culture, music and history on Monday evening. The control board located in a basement in Nørrebro was silenced for what host Abraham Kopenhagen called "security reasons". “PET says it's too dangerous,” Kopenhagen told DR Nyheder. “We do not feel that it is too dangerous, but we respect the information we are given.” Kopenhagen said that Radio Shalom will be back on the air when PET tells them that it is safe. The security agency offered to protect the station while it was on air, but Kopenhagen turned them down. “We must do as instructed, but we will not have police standing outside the door,” he said. "We would rather close down until it is quiet again. I do not know how long that will take.” The radio station was not the only Jewish institution in Copenhagen that chose to shut its doors following the weekend's attacks, which included the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Dan Uzan, a guard standing in front of the synagogue on Krystalgade by Omar Abdel El-Hussein. The Jewish school Carolineskolen was also closed yesterday.
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| Imam Abu Bilal Ismail [Image Source: MEMRI] |
a regular speaker at the Grimhøj Mosque in Aarhus, and accused of encouraging young Muslims to travel to Syria to fight in the bloodbath there.
In Denmark, not one returned fighter [from the Syrian killing fields] has been locked up. Instead officials here are providing free psychological counselling while finding returnees jobs and spots in schools and universities. Officials credit a new effort to reach out to a radical mosque with staunching the flow of recruits... “I know how some people think. They are afraid of us, the ones coming back,” says Talha, a name he adopted to protect his identity because he never told his father he went to fight. “Look, we are really not dangerous.”
In a Danish article, "Head of Grimhøj mosque supports IS" [DR.dk, January 15, 2015], the same Aarhus-based house of prayer is said to be
known in the media as a hotbed for radicalised young Muslims. Numerous youth from the region who have attended the mosque have subsequently travelled to Syria to fight in the conflict. The mosque is now making waves once again. In the documentary “Den Fordømte Moské” (“The Condemned Mosque”), shown on DR1 on Tuesday evening, Oussama El Saadi, head of the mosque, declared his support of Islamic State. “I hope that IS wins and that we one day will have an Islamic state in the world,” said El Saadi in the documentary... [He] believes that the western world’s declaration of war against IS is not a war against terror, but rather against the entire Muslim world. Therefore, he says, it also hurts when the Danish state is at war against people in the Middle East.
Evidently it also hurts the Danish state and its fair-minded people to see one of their own shot down by Danish police, even though the shooter was a cruel murderer of innocent and unarmed strangers, and was holding a powerful weapon at the time:Numerous bouquets had been laid at the killing site of the suspected Copenhagen gunman, 22-year-old Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein. The flowers were laid in solidarity with the alleged terrorist’s family, locals told reporters... Masked young men, describing themselves as “brothers” of the suspected gunman behind attacks in Copenhagen, removed flowers and candles from the site where he was fatally shot by police. The young men said they removed the flowers because it is not a Muslim tradition to lay flowers for the dead. [Sputnik News, February 16, 2015]Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen, a beloved theme of our childhood, seems to be rapidly receding into the distance, never to appear again.
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