Omar is dead: Aphasia and the escalating anti-radicalization business

ABSTRACT

The article investigates the effects of a terror attack in Copenhagen and the subsequent escalating anti-radicalization business. On February 15, 2015, Omar el-Hussein was shot dead by the Danish police. Earlier that day, Omar el-Hussein had killed two people: a Jewish guard in front of a synagogue and a participant in a cultural event on freedom of speech. A few days later, the government adopted the largest (counter-) terrorism package in the history of Denmark. Although the package was presented as a firm response to the Copenhagen shootings, the legislation primarily targeted ‘Islamic foreign fighters’. Among acquaintances of Omar el-Hussein, the slippage was clearly noticed. Omar el-Hussein had never fought in the Middle East but was known, first and foremost, as a petty criminal who had recently been released from a Danish prison. I argue that a central condition for the change of scale from ‘criminal Danish citizen’ to ‘Islamic foreign fighter’ is aphasia – the occlusion of knowledge surrounding Omar that was consolidated with his death. The empty space of Omar enabled a new political logic that produced new scales of measurement, which, in turn, led to an accelerating anti-radicalization industry that occluded the killing of other Danish Muslim citizens; namely, the victims of a gang war in Danish housing projects. As the anti-radicalization business grew and created an excess of legislation, institutions and policies that targeted violent extremism by Islamic terrorists, it became increasingly difficult to voice and recognise the extreme violence that primarily targeted Danish Muslim citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-radicalization
• terror
• foreign fighters
• Muslims
• gangs
• Denmark

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This number is retrieved by searching on ‘radicalization’ in the largest Danish media archive (Infomedia 2018).

2 The data is collected from the Ministry of Finance’s database (FM 2018). All numbers are adjusted for inflation rates according to Statistics Denmark and shown at November 2015 prices. The sample is delimited to the period 2013–2019 due to the fact that prior to 2013 the budget of PET was part of the Danish National Police (Rigspolitiet) and consequently not registered separately in the Finance Act (Finansloven).

3 The data is collected from the Danish Parliament (Folketinget 2019) and the Legal Information (Retsinformation.dk 2019) and generated through text searches on ‘radicalization’ in the written bill proposals presented and later adopted in the Danish parliament between 2000 and 2018.

4 These numbers are generated from bibliotek.dk’s database (Bibliotek.dk 2019) that catalogues all publications in public Danish libraries. The data includes Danish-language, non-fiction books listed under the subject ‘radicalization’.

5 The accelerating anti-radicalization business is, of course, not a unique Danish phenomenon. In Europe, the sector has developed in response to the terrorist attacks in various European metropoles since 2004. Most scholars study it as a political discourse rather than a growing economy. See Githens-Mazer (2012) on the emergence of the radicalization discourse, and Kundnani (2012) for an analysis of the genealogy of the concept of radicalization.

6 In 2015 the Mayor of Aarhus, Jacob Bundsgaard, was invited to present the so-called Aarhus-Model at the ‘White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism’ in Washington (WINEP 2015).

7 From meeting in the Danish government’s research network on radicalization (August 29, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Aalborg University talent programme; Danish Research Council for Independent Research [grant number DFF–4001–00223].