Nicolai Sennels, Holy Wrath: Among Criminal Muslims

Helsingborg, Sweden: Logik Förlag, 2018.

The reader of Holy Wrath is likely to be overwhelmed by a single question: Why would a peaceful, progressive, and prosperous society such as Denmark invest resources to bring an alien and disruptive population into its midst? The book does not address this question, but it does analyze why Third World immigration, especially from Muslim countries, is problematic, and offers suggestions for ameliorating the situation.

Nicolai Sennels is a Danish psychologist who worked as a therapist at a Copenhagen juvenile detention facility from 2005 to 2008. Most of the hundreds of young offenders Sennels counseled were Muslims. In the winter of 2008 he attended a conference on immigrant integration in the Danish capital where he presented his views on the subject. His remarks were not well received by some, deemed at odds “with the core values of the Copenhagen Municipality.” He was soon forced out of his job. He used his severance pay to write Blandt Kriminelle muslimer (2009), a book widely reviewed and discussed in Denmark. It was translated into Swedish in 2017, but received the silent treatment by the establishment media there. The English language edition, translated by Maria Celander, was published in early 2018.

In considering this book I have assumed that the author has expressed his true beliefs regarding Third World populations in Europe (i. e., he has not moderated his views in an effort to appeal to a wider audience). I also assume that his positions have remained essentially the same since the original book appeared.

A brief internet search reveals that subsequent to this book Sennels has written a number of articles on the problems associated with Muslim populations in Europe such as criminality and low IQ.[1] He has stood as a candidate for the Danish People’s Party (DPP), and, as noted on the dustjacket, was a founding member of the Danish chapter of PEGIDA, an offshoot of the German populist nationalist movement now known in Denmark as For Frihed.

The book provides insight into the ideology of European civic nationalism, an alt-lite position. The DPP, for example, supports the national culture of Denmark and opposes multiculturalism. It seeks to limit immigration and assimilate immigrants already in Denmark. On other issues its policy positions are moderate within the Danish political context.

Denmark, as with many European countries, does not keep explicitly racial statistics. Thus a foreigner could be a Nordic from North America, or a Negro from the Congo. To be considered “Danish,” (87 percent of the population in 2017) a person needs to have at least one parent of Danish citizenship. About a third of the foreigners in Denmark are of “Western” background, again an imprecise term. One estimate puts Denmark’s non-White population at approximately ten percent.[2]

Regardless of the exact demographics, “67 percent of youth crime in Copenhagen is committed by people of foreign descent,” and most are of “Muslim background” (15). One can understand why European civic nationalists are fixated on the Muslim problem while seeming to eschew more fundamental societal concerns. The sheer numbers and immediate negative impact of Muslim migration puts it in a category of its own. Civic nationalists view the Muslim maladjustment as an issue of integration. Muslim youths often do poorly in school and vocation programs. They have high rates of unemployment, drug use, and criminality. They show little desire to socially engage with the larger culture.

Being a civic nationalist, Sennels puts Muslim difficulties within a cultural context — cultural differences, cultural conflicts — rather than in racial or ethnic terms. TOO takes the position that culture is, in part, the product of a people’s ethny.[3] The ability of a society to assimilate foreigners depends on the relative number of newcomers and their ethnic and cultural distance from the dominate culture. Denmark would be able to assimilate a small number of Poles, for example, but a large number of Syrians would be unassimilable.

Holy Wrath begins by describing Sønderbro, a maximum-security juvenile detention facility in Copenhagen. Here the author spent three years as the prison psychologist treating 250 young offenders, most were Muslims. By American standards the inmates had a rather permissive incarceration, and one study proclaimed the facility to be the “best place in Denmark to serve a sentence” (17).

From the author’s descriptions it seems that Muslin subculture in Denmark has a number of similarities with Black American subculture. For example, the Muslim youths often have stare-down contests and adopt an “aggressive demeanor” (19). Some wear “heavy gold necklaces, expensive gangster clothes from top to bottom” (80). Then there is their disproportional criminality. It is not just the number of crimes, but the nature of those crimes. Immigrant crime is more violent, and their victims are “75 percent ethnic Danes” (22). Plus, the children of immigrants have a higher rate of offending than their parents. Sennels relates how his charges “brag about how invulnerable and all-powerful they feel walking in a group with their pockets full of drug money, when people on the street are scared of them.” (93). In America White boys who try to adopt Black culture are called whiggers. In Denmark there is a similar phenomenon where Danish boys “who hung out with Muslims” acquire Muslim cultural characteristics (53).

The author found a great deal of “racism against Danes among immigrants that you rarely hear about” (22).Many Immigrants hold Danes and Danish culture in contempt, yet they have no desire to leave the country. Danes are viewed as “weak and nervous.” Muslim “kids and their parents alike have very little respect for the school system and its teachers” (37). Sennels believes that at Sønderbro his “Muslim co-workers, by and large, shared the kids’ aversion towards the Danish society” (67). Among his Muslim colleagues “the nicer the religious Muslim behaves, the more eloquent and intellectual he is, the stronger his agenda to influence society in an Islamic direction” (129). Antipathy towards the host country, however, does not produce a desire to return to one’s homelands. In fact, what the offenders “fear more than anything is deportation from Denmark.” So you have a situation where “people with no respect for the laws and values of the land fear expulsion” (68).

Sennels cites the case of Shuab Khan, a 21 year old who was part of a gang that beat and stabbed a man to death. “Despite receiving a sentence of eight years in prison, Shuab told his lawyer that he was relieved that he would not be deported: ‘My client is very relieved. Being sent back to Pakistan is what he feared more than anything in this case,’ the lawyer said to reporters” (69).

Resisting integration and assimilation with no desire to repatriate is the mindset of colonists and settlers, not immigrants. The seventeenth-century English in Massachusetts had no intention of assimilating into Amerindian culture, nor did they see their journey to America as a mere sojourn. They were there to establish a new England.

If the conventional Danish Right wants to assimilate Third World immigrants, it would seems likely that some coercion would be required to make this policy successful. Sennels does not use the word coercion, but rather “demands” and “consequences.” At times this takes on a tough love strategy, while at other times he expresses skepticism that any combination of policies and programs could successfully acculturate Muslims into Danish society.

The Left, Sennels complains, exacerbates the problem of assimilation (thank God they are good for something!) by offering “explanations based on external control” for immigrant difficulties (49}. It is the police, the schools, the government bureaucrats, etc. who are to blame for immigrant alienation and the resulting social friction. With the help from the Danish Left immigrants become victims without responsibility. They develop “a sense of entitlement that you ‘deserve better.’ You feel that other people owe you things, and you deserve more support, more money, more sympathy, more rights, and so on” (51). It appears that the Danish Left, as with most Western Leftists, are okay with multiculturalism, so their idea of integration and assimilation differs from that of the Right.

Islam, as with most religions, is both a religion and a culture, and the two cannot be easily separated. The Islamic critique of the West is both cultural and religious, so militant Muslims may not be particularly religious. Islam is a universal creed, similar in this regard to communism and liberal capitalism. Universalist ideologies seek global hegemony. The ultimate goal of Islam is “to create a worldwide caliphate” (130). The Muslims have “limitless loyalty to the group” (29), and the author claims “to deeply respect the solidarity that the immigrants feel with their families and friends” (31). If Danes had the same group loyalty as the immigrants, they would never have permitted these aliens into their land.

None of the Muslims in Sennels care considered themselves to be truly Danish, even those born in Denmark who spoke fluent Danish. He cites surveys from France and Germany that also show a lack of assimilation. European studies of immigrants revel “that the highest degree of extremism is among well-educated Muslims” (136). Consider the mostly well-educated and well-traveled 9/11 hijackers. Muslims in Europe are generally very religious, and extremist positions “are commonplace among Muslims in Europe.” Then again, it is a mistake to focus only on theology because religions are “political and ideological systems” (139). I believe this lack of assimilation is both predictable and a positive phenomenon. A less embedded alien population will be easier to extract when the opportunity arises.

Sennels, a clinical psychologist, might lack the historical perspective that ideally a social psychologist would have. The author maintains that Muslim bad behavior “is, of course, largely due to low self-esteem” (19), and “a fragile pride indicates low self-esteem” (55). But prickly pride and an aggressive demeanor might not be symptoms of low self-esteem. Consider the nobles of Tudor and Stuart England who fought to grievous injury or death over slights to their honor. They were members of a class with wealth, power, and social status unlikely to suffer from low self-esteem. I imagine that 300 years ago the nobles of Denmark had a similar temperament.

Perhaps it is the post-modern Danes who lack self-esteem, not so much on an individual level, but on a collective level where they lack the confidence to be masters in their own house. The author believes that “true self-esteem is when you feel comfortable enough with others to enjoy their qualities, and not think about who is ‘worth more’ than the other” (57). That can be the attitude among family and friends, but not towards competing groups.

Sennels gives a telling description of urban, post-modern Danish society in order to contrast the hyper-individualism of Scandinavia with the more collectivist Muslim communities. “People live alone or with their immediate family. You do not meddle in your neighbors business and you do not make much of an effort to get to know them. . . . You can live in the same building as ten other families without ever shaking a neighbor’s hand, much less asking them how they are doing or whether they need help with anything. You live your life separate from other people.” (61). I assume life is not so atomized in small towns and rural areas, but the city usually represents a society’s future, while the countryside embodies its past.

So one cultural difference between Danes and Muslims could be individualism vs. communalism. Another the book identifies is locus of control, the extent to which a person believes he has control over his own life. I am not sure the author had this in mind, but I would modify or expand this characteristic to include degree of self-control or self-regulation possessed by Danes and Muslims. Muslim societies rely on external controls by authorities whether governmental or familial, to regulate behavior, while Danish society relies more on internal control by individual members of society. This would explain why Muslim countries require a strongman or dictator to hold their societies together. When the dictator is removed or weakened as in Iraq, Libya, or Syria years of chaos ensue until authoritarian rule is restored. Muslims tend to be “more suspicious of other people, because they project their aggression on their surroundings,” a characteristic of low-trust societies (42). The author found that Muslim youths “became insecure and confused” if given too much freedom (73).

As mentioned above, Sennels has ambivalent feelings toward immigrants in Denmark. Can they integrated and assimilated? If so, how? If not, “history has failed to provide a single example of a Muslim culture that co-exists peacefully with other cultures” (102). Without assimilation he sees a bifurcated society with little social cohesion as people become less trusting and more self-centered.

Then there is “the myth of immigrants’ contribution to the economy” (104). Increased population will increase the GDP, but costs associated with immigrant social services are straining state budgets. Only a very few extraordinary immigrants produce a net gain for the Danish economy. In general massive Third World immigration into Europe could be “the largest social experiment in world history. Sadly, it does not look like the experiment is going to succeed” (77). I suppose that depends on your definition of success. If your goal is to destroy the cultural and genetic heritage of the West, than Third World migration appears to be succeeding splendidly.

In the conclusion to Holy Wrath, Sennels gives some of the backstory on how he came to write this book. The so called Week 7 (winter break) riots of February, 2008 were a wake-up call to Denmark that present policies and programs to assimilate immigrants were not working. These disturbances “ravaged Copenhagen and its suburbs,” yet they were not even mentioned at the “Diversity and Security” conference on immigrant integration that the author attended in the capital a couple weeks later (155).

After Sennels gave a presentation suggesting that immigrants themselves should take more responsibility for their inclusion into Danish society he was privately threatened by “two Muslim municipal employees” who took exception to his comments. The conference’s final report, a politically correct document par excellence, was “unable to come up with a single suggestion on what immigrants themselves could do about the problems with crime, integration, and extremism” (156). There were, however, “tons of demands on the police and security service, and the social welfare system” (157). A few days later Sennels was out of a job.

In both the Forward, by Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlqvist, and in Sennels’ concluding chapter, four policies choices are considered for dealing with immigrants. The first is forced assimilation. Carlqvist writes: “In my experience and according to a number of studies, this is impossible to implement in reality” (10). In any case it would take generations and is certainly not worth the effort. The second possibility is to alter Danish culture to accommodate the newcomers. Hello! This is already happening to an extent as Danes modify their lifestyle to avoid conflicts with the newcomers. To be completely successful this strategy would “profoundly change” Danish society (157). The third path is to stay the present course, maintain the status quo. This would result in a dual society that portends grater conflict in the future. The fourth possibility is selective deportation of immigrants unable to assimilate — criminals, religious extremists, and the chronically unemployed. To be effective it appears that policies one, two, and four require that future immigration be severely reduced.

I would like to propose a fifth possibility. Declare Denmark the ethnostate of the Danish people, completely end non-White immigration, greatly curtail all immigration, and begin a gradual, but complete repatriation of all non-White immigrants and their descendants. To compensate for the loss of population the above policies entail strongly pro-natal policies with a eugenic component be instituted. While it may appear highly presumptuous for an American who has made only two short visits to Denmark to suggest public policy for that nation, I do have at least some connection to the kingdom. Some of my ancestors were subjects of Danish kings who, until the seventeenth century, controlled significant swaths of what is now southern Sweden.

Holy Wrath would be a good read for those interested in European civic nationalism and the challenges brought about by Third World, particularly Muslim, immigration. Obviously a short review cannot cover all the pedagogical and psychological insights Sennels gained from his work with Muslim youth. The book’s main drawback is that it was written ten years ago and much has happened since, especially the massive migrations beginning in 2015. A chapter updating the situation in Denmark, and Europe in general would have been useful. Perhaps that will be in another book.

Setting aside any ideological differences I have with the author, Nicolai Sennels should be highly commended for standing up Islamic zealots and Leftist fanatics. Let us hope that the Danes, along with their European brothers, start defending their land and people before it is too late.

[1] https://www.jihadwatch.org/author/nicolai-sennels

[2] http://www.worldpopulationreview.com/countries/denmark-population

[3] Some early issues of TOQ include a “Statement of Principles.” This statement, which I believe was written largely by the late Sam Francis, outlines “the core beliefs and values” of TOQ. Among those beliefs is that “race informs culture,” meaning that race gives culture its character and essence. I would add that it can be considered a law of history that ethnic change always results in cultural change. Race is not a social construct, society is a racial construct. The editors and publisher, “A Statement of Principles,” The Occidental Quarterly, v.3 #4 (Winter2003/2004) 3.