On February 20, a crowd of 600 to 800 people turned out for El-Hussein’s funeral at a mosque on the outskirts of the capital. The large number of attendees has been interpreted as an explicit endorsement of his attack. But the more likely explanation is a combination of community support for the family, rollover from the normal Friday prayer crowd, and a smaller Salafist contingent that was, in fact, explicitly condoning El-Hussein’s actions.

Yet it was also a way to say to Danish society “up yours, we will be defiant,” said Ranstorp. “This is an anti-West sentiment that is growing. And it’s growing in our cities and our neighborhoods. How do you devise policy for that?” The Al Qaeda narrative that the West is at war (both figuratively and literally) with Islam, once a peripheral, extremist view, has now become mainstream for young Muslims raised amid the discourse of the war on terror, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo.

“This generational battle means the problem is much larger than a small nucleus of extremists,” he said. “It’s also about inclusion, about feeling part of the same society.”

Part of what makes finding solutions so difficult is that, arguably, life in Denmark is good for immigrants in communities like Mjølnerparken. Overall, Denmark ranks among the happiest nations in the world, and citizens benefit from a robust social safety net, which includes free health care, free university education, and other state-sponsored benefits. “It’s not a natural law that you are oppressed if you’re dark-skinned in Denmark,” said Aydin Soei, a sociologist who met El-Hussein in 2011 while researching the gangs of Mjølnerparken. “If you look at the stats, most young people from these areas and with the same family background as El-Hussein actually turn out to have good lives.”

Many gang members in Copenhagen don’t recognize their privilege, however. “Part of their identity is that they’re living in the same reality as the oppressed black man in the American ghettos,” Soei said. And this belief feeds a narrative of victimization that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who never leave their insular communities.

That’s not to say that racism isn’t an issue in Denmark. There’s no doubt that landing a job interview is harder with a Muslim-sounding name on your resumé. Nagieb Khaja, a war correspondent whose parents came to Denmark from Afghanistan, said that as a young man growing up in an immigrant community on the outskirts of Copenhagen, he felt discrimination most profoundly at the nightclubs, where he often couldn’t make it past the bouncer at the door. Gangs, however, offered power and prestige. “When I went out with the gangsters, we didn’t have to stand in the queue. We were treated like kings,” he said. “It was a totally different world.” Many of his friends from those days became either gangsters or social workers. Today, he said, kids from these communities are increasingly becoming Islamists—in the post–September 11 world, the most provocative way to reject the society from which one feels alienated.

The public response to the shooting has not helped alleviate that sense of antagonism. In February, polling data showed that half of Danes want to curb the number of Muslims allowed to live in Denmark. The anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party received a surge of support, finishing second in June elections. A new center-right government announced it would cut immigrants’ benefits and strengthen border controls. Today the party’s founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, who was once named “racist of the year” by a Swedish magazine, is now speaker of Parliament.

El-Hussein’s milieu is a subculture that defines itself in opposition. “They have an enormous hatred toward society, and the hatred also has to do with the identity of being a religious minority,” said Soei.

That doesn’t mean that places like Mjølnerparken are hotbeds of potential terrorists. Not all disaffected young men pick up an assault rifle and gun down innocent people. In the aftermath of the attack, a spokesman for the Brothas publicly disavowed El-Hussein’s actions. And Soei said his contacts in the gang told him that El-Hussein had been kicked out earlier because he was too violent and couldn’t be controlled.

Still, the parallels between the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and El-Hussein’s, between the profiles of the attackers and so many of the gang members Soei has interviewed over the years, are striking.

“If I were a lawmaker, a politician in another European country with the same problems as we have in Denmark and in Paris, I would be concerned,” Soei said. “The feeling of not belonging, the feeling of society being against you, of you being against society … isn’t a Danish problem or a French problem. It’s a common European problem.”

Several weeks after my initial visit to Mjølnerparken, I sat down again with Ahmed and Abdurramadan, along with two of their friends, Abdi and Salahedin. Like young people the world over, they were at various moments outspoken and ambivalent as they sought to articulate their worldview. They were critical of Israel and expressed support for Palestine. They supported the principle of an Islamic caliphate. Yet they were also bothered by the atrocities committed by isis—killing children, beheading hostages. That was not their conception of Islam.

Not that they were devout, learned Muslims. “I’m not practicing so much,” Salahedin admitted. “But I’m reading a little bit. Not the Koran because I don’t read Arabic.” He was absorbing YouTube clips, isis propaganda, and occasional sermons at the mosque, though. “I’m just checking everything out.”

What they agreed on was that, if the status quo persists, the next generation will be all the more violent.

Omar El-Hussein’s actions were the product of a combustible nature and a discourse that paints all Muslims as fanatics.

“He felt like the world looked down on Muslims. And they kinda do,” said Abdi. “If you keep telling that guy, ‘You a terrorist, you a terrorist’—on the television, everywhere you look—at the end, he’s gonna think, ‘I’m a terrorist.’”