Previously: Part 1 and Part 2.
A Consideration of Muslim Crime in the UK
and the Response of the British Authorities
Part 3
By Pike Bishop
V. Islam, Muslims, and Crime from the Perspective of a Psychologist
It is important to understand that the problems Britain faces with Muslims and their criminality are not anomalous in the wider European context. On the contrary, other Western European countries seem to have even worse Muslim crime problems than the UK.
In the Netherlands, the Muslim crime problem in Moroccan and Turkish form has been largely responsible for propelling the brilliant Geert Wilders to a position of political prominence. One can only conclude that the Dutch no longer have any interest in being attacked and robbed in, and in extreme cases driven off, their own streets. Those Britons feeling a sense of dismay over the type and scale of Muslim criminality in the UK can look to the Netherlands to see what happens when this particular cancer is allowed to metastasise even more freely than it is here, fostered by insane immigration policies and subsidised by a welfare state that acts as a magnet for the useless, the criminal and the indolent.
Casting our gaze further afield, the link between Islam and crime becomes ever clearer. In France, rioting on the part of Muslim youth of mainly Maghrebian and African origin has become uncontrollable and endemic, with the 2005 riots being only the most extreme example to date. In Sweden, the mass importation of Muslims, largely from Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, combined with consequent white flight, threatens to turn Malmö, the third largest city in the country, into a Muslim-majority city in the not-too-distant future, with everything that implies for crime (which is surging), the rule of law (which is disintegrating), and the general character of the city (which is deteriorating). Jews are already fleeing due to the constant intimidation they experience there, and arson, rioting, and the stoning of representatives of the state are daily occurrences in the worst-afflicted parts of the city.
In Norway, the police report that in the period 2007-2009, all 41 assault rapes in the city of Oslo, all of them, were committed by non-Western immigrants, and overwhelmingly by Muslims. And in Germany, a police union has suggested that Turkish police, which is to say Turkish police from Turkey, not German police of Turkish origin, be asked to patrol immigrant (and, one assumes, heavily Turkish) ghettos in North-Rhine Westphalia, due to the inability of the German police to maintain law and order in these areas themselves. Such is the scale of the problems European countries now face in the form of Muslim criminality.
We cannot do justice to this subject here, but we can share with readers the insights of a man all too familiar with the Muslim crime problem currently tearing apart the social fabric of his own country. Nicolai Sennels1 is a Danish psychologist who has very generously contributed a key section of this document. We will let him share his insights with readers in his own words.
Islam, Muslims, and Crime from the Perspective of a Psychologist (by Dr. Nicolai Sennels)
As a psychologist in a youth prison in the municipality of Copenhagen I had around 150 Muslim and 100 non-Muslim clients (seven out of ten inmates in Danish youth prisons are of Muslim backgrounds). All the clients were in the same age group, and had similar backgrounds with respect to family incomes and parents’ educational backgrounds. Having hundreds of therapy sessions both individually and in groups (Muslim, non-Muslim and mixed) was an excellent opportunity to compare the two groups. On the basis of these sessions, I concluded that Islam itself is the main reason for the unsuccessful integration of Muslims, the creation of lawless and hostile Muslim parallel societies, and the high crime rates that prevail among Muslim immigrants.
Though some will no doubt consider it controversial to include people’s religious and cultural backgrounds when analysing the causes of anti-social behaviour, it is actually an expression of true humanism. We have to look at the whole person, including his culture and religious beliefs, if we want to understand what motivates his actions. The argument that poverty and stigmatisation are the only reasons for destructive behaviour among Muslims reveals a very one-dimensional view of the human being. In reality, our actions are influenced by far more, and far stronger, factors than simply the amount of money in our bank account or what other people think of us and say about us. Cultural and religious values are much more important factors than these.
Unfortunately, many people are unable to recognize the obvious; that different cultures cultivate different characteristics in people. All families develop certain patterns, a specific culture even, within themselves, and these patterns have great influence over the development of the children. Some families manage to produce self-confident, empathetic, and responsible offspring, while others do not. In the same vein, the different cultures of the world influence people in different ways, and they are not all equally good at inculcating characteristics conducive to productive and law-abiding behavior in Western societies.
On the basis of my years as a professional psychologist treating Muslims, I will try to explain how Islam tends to inculcate certain psychological characteristics amongst its followers.
Aggression
One of the most important of my findings is that Muslim cultures have an opposite view of anger to the one that prevails in Western societies. We see anger as an expression of weakness. In Denmark we have a saying: ‘Only small dogs bark. Big dogs don’t have to.’ Sudden outbreaks of anger result in the loss of face and social status. As people who have engaged in such embarrassing behaviour (such as at work, or at a family dinner) know, it takes time and a conscious effort to allow people to regain their trust in us.
In Muslim cultures, anger, threats, and violence are much more socially accepted as ways of handling conflicts or showing power. As a Muslim, your family and friends expect you to react aggressively if you, or what you represent, are challenged in any way. If you, as a Muslim, fail to do this, doubts will immediately be sown as to whether you are able to shoulder your share of responsibility in defending your family, ethnic group, territory or religion. A recent study involving in-depth interviews with 45,000 teenagers in Germany supports this conclusion.2
One does not have to be a psychologist to see that this attitude towards anger is one of the main causes for the high violent crime rates amongst Muslims. And the problem is exacerbated immensely by the Muslim concept of honour. This creates fragile, glass-like personalities, and makes male Muslims in particular sensitive to the slightest criticism. What Muslims call ‘honour’, we in the West tend to refer to as low self-confidence.
Locus of Control
Another important finding from my therapy room concerns the so-called ‘locus of control’. Our locus of control determines whether we experience our life as mainly influenced by inner or outer factors. In the West, we learn throughout our lives that our own attitudes and decisions shape our lives and influence our states of mind. The same goes for our way of handling our thoughts and feelings, and our ability to handle difficult experiences and situations constructively. Thus our locus of control is largely internal. Muslims, on the other hand, are primarily brought up to have an external locus of control, consisting of strict external cultural and religious rules, and immediate and heavy consequences for individual thinking or stepping outside the “box”. Our Western societies are built on the assumption of individual free will, and the notion that we are masters of our own fate. In contrast, the Islamic term ‘inshallah’ (Allah willing) follows every wish or plan Muslims make about the future.
Our Western sense of responsibility for self hugely increases our ability to solve our own problems. Muslims, on the other hand, and as we have seen, have an external locus of control and therefore tend to blame others, with non-Muslims and non-Islamic authorities being the usual scapegoats. While Westerners tend to think ‘what can I do differently?’ when experiencing difficulties, Muslims tend to think ‘who did this to me?’.
This feeling of an outer locus of control is the basis of, and the fuel for, a lot of the anger among Muslims everywhere towards non-Muslims and the non-Muslim world in general. They see us as the cause of their (usually self-created) emotional misery, financial woe, and lack of social status. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many Muslims see the hostile attitudes and destructive behaviour they so often direct at their ‘oppressors’ as being natural and justified. The resulting violent hostility towards non-Muslims and non-Islamic authorities is an ever-prevalent consequence of this, and one that is entirely explicable and predictable.
Unfortunately, the problems caused by the Muslim external locus of control are exacerbated by the broadly accepted but mistaken view that anti-social people are victims of some unjust external factor with respect to which they are powerless. This interaction reinforces the childlike victim mentality that is the natural consequence of having an external locus of control. No experienced psychologist will accept such attempts at self-justification. If we do not dare to show people how they create and perpetuate their own problems, how will they ever mature, take responsibility for themselves, and stop being a burden on those around them?
As a psychologist for criminal Muslims, I found that they often felt no remorse whatsoever for their harmful actions. The external reasons they provided for their harmful behaviour (such as being ‘provoked’ or treated ‘unfairly’, and thus ‘forced’ to ‘retaliate’) resulted in there being no possibility of them feeling personally responsible. In some professional circles, there is currently much discussion as to whether Islam might actually inculcate psychopathic character traits (such as lack of empathy) in its followers.
Identity
A third finding during the hundreds of hours with Muslim clients on my couch is that the extent to which they identify with being Muslims, and as belonging to the Muslim community, is very great indeed. It is something they feel far more strongly than most Westerners would identify with being, for example, Christian. Most of these clients were not practising Islam, and in many cases they had had sex before marriage and had drunk alcohol, things antithetical to being a ‘good Muslim’. Despite their often less-than-holy behaviour, they felt a strong loyalty towards Islam nonetheless. Thus many of my Muslim clients had ended up in the prison I worked at precisely because of the obligation they felt to defend their religion against any kind of criticism, by any means necessary (starting riots, attacking the authorities, threatening people who criticise Islam, etc.).
Muslims’ strong identification with their cultural and religious background is the cause of a powerful and dangerous us-and-them mentality. Thus I experienced far more racism among the Muslim inmates than among any other group. While our societies try to inculcate tolerance and equality, Muslim culture and Islamic teachings insist on the importance of the difference between believers and infidels. I had dozens of Muslim clients that had been involved in serious riots against the Danish authorities, and the general picture is very clear. The victim mentality and acceptance of anger that are part of Muslim culture, combined with Muslims’ loyalty towards Islam and their strong discrimination between Muslims and non-Muslims, are the main reason that — while police, firemen and other representatives from our non-Islamic authorities are being met with hostility and violence when entering Muslim-dominated areas in our cities — Islamic authorities such as imams, patrols of older Muslim men, and Sharia courts are free to exert their power.
Unless it concerned rival Muslim gangs or ‘honour’-related crimes, all violence committed by my Muslim clients had been against non-Muslims. When I talked with my Muslim clients about this fact during therapy, and especially during anger management sessions, they told me that non-Muslims were a more legitimate target. It emerged that they see our society’s lack of meaningful response and Europeans’ non-aggressive ways of handling conflicts as signs of exploitable weakness. Alarmingly, I also discovered that there exists amongst Muslims a demonisation of non-Muslims that has many similarities to the propaganda countries disseminate against their enemies during wartime, propaganda that serves to strengthen the hatred soldiers feel for their enemies, killing off all empathy and enabling them to fight without mercy.
It is worth mentioning in closing that there is an interesting phenomenon amongst Muslim prisoners, in that the greatest social status and respect always accrue to the more extreme Muslims. This is a dangerous tendency indeed.
Islam, Muslims and Crime
Seen from the perspective of Western psychology it is without doubt unhealthy for the development of one’s personality to grow up in an Islamic environment. Its high acceptance of anger and lack of self-responsibility and tolerance produces a relatively high number of anti-social and psychologically immature individuals.
Having had a closer look at Muslim cultures than most, I have no doubts whatsoever that the integration of Muslims into our Western societies will never happen to any useful extent. Muslim pressure for the Islamization of our societies will therefore never end and there will be constant and growing violent conflicts between Muslims and their non-Islamic surroundings.
I believe the solution to this problem will consist of the following steps. Firstly, we must bring a complete halt to Muslim immigration and the awarding of citizenship to Muslim immigrants and refugees, at least until the feasibility of Muslim integration is established. Secondly, we have to make non-integration so impractical and financially detrimental that immigrants who cannot or will not integrate feel that repatriation (state-sponsored emigration) is, for them, the better option. Thirdly, we have to limit the state child support so that families only receive financial support for a number of children equal to the average in a given country. Parents that work, which is to say natives and well-integrated immigrants, will still have the necessary financial means to have large families if they wish. There is nothing wrong with making unpleasant guests feel unwelcome!
VI. The Dark Figure and Other Subtleties
We have already pointed out that official crime statistics are not available by religion of perpetrator, which makes it impossible to say what the official Muslim crime rate is for any particular crime. However, even if such statistics were available, there would still be questions as to their reliability.
For any crime to enter the official statistics, it must first be reported, and then recorded. Let us consider each of these processes in turn. The first, reporting, is fairly self-explanatory, but still requires a little thought. For a crime to be reported, there must be:
| 1. | An awareness on the part of the victim that a crime has taken place at all. | |
| 2. | A willingness to report the crime. |
Staying with our two examples from Section III, it is far from obvious that a seven-year-old who has just undergone FGM knows she has had a crime committed against her. Similarly, it is far from obvious that a 14-year-old girl who is being drugged, threatened, beaten, and pimped will be prepared to go to the police to report these various crimes. These two factors both force down the reporting rate to an extent that varies widely as a function of the crime in question, though not necessarily its seriousness.
Nearly all burglaries are reported, as reporting a burglary to the police is necessary to make an insurance claim. However, rape — a much more serious crime — is reported much less frequently due to such factors as shame and a reluctance to have it made public that one was raped.
Next, there is the question of whether or not the report in question will result in the police recording it as a crime. If the police are not satisfied that a crime has actually taken place as reported, they will simply not record it, and it will effectively disappear from the official viewpoint. Taken together these two processes constitute attrition, that process whereby the number of actually-committed crimes is, in effect, whittled down to the official figure. The difference, i.e. the number of crimes that have ‘gone missing’, is referred to as the dark figure. This dark figure is the source of many of the difficulties that bedevil the discipline of criminology, and criminologists have developed various methods for trying to address it. However, none of these methods will be useful for addressing the dark figure for those Muslim crimes most likely to escape the attention of the authorities.3
We have now established a number of key points:
| 1. | Trying to establish the amount of any given crime taking place is a very difficult endeavour due to fundamental methodological difficulties. | |
| 2. | This is particularly true for certain categories of crime. Most obviously, these include those that the victims do not consider to be crime, and those that they refuse to report, for whatever reasons. Other studies can help fill in the blanks in some cases, but not with respect to the crimes we are most interested in here. | |
| 3. | A significant fraction of the most depraved and damaging Muslim crime (FGM, pimping, etc.) is of a type that is unlikely ever to show up in official statistics, and therefore, by definition, cannot result in police action, much less appropriate convictions. | |
| 4. | Any official statistics that exist on these crimes are therefore likely to be hopelessly inaccurate. This means that only unofficial estimates can be given, and these are always of doubtful reliability, especially with respect to crimes such as pimping. | |
| 5. | Any official statistics that could, in principle, exist are not broken down by the religion of perpetrator anyway. |
As a consequence of the above, we are concerned by the impossibility, at present, of a member of the general public really gaining any sort of idea at all as to how prevalent Muslim crime is, or how disproportionately involved in crime Muslims are. Of course, this impossibility also obtains with respect to Chinese crime, or Armenian crime, or any other sort of crime. However, there is no reason to believe that these groups are particularly criminal, or that the police tend to turn a blind eye to their criminal activities. Neither claim can be made with respect to Muslims.
We would seem to have no option but to look at the disproportionality in incarceration to give us a general idea, as noted in Section II of this document. But there are problems here too. Even if we ignore the conversion problem outlined earlier, we still have great difficulties in this regard:
- Is the threefold overrepresentation of Muslims in the prison system evidence of crime rates three times higher across the board, with an identical probability of post-crime incarceration for Muslims and non-Muslims?
- Are Muslim crime rates perhaps ten times higher, with the probability of incarceration for Muslims somehow having moved down lower than for non-Muslims?
- Or are Muslims no more criminal than anyone else, their greater incarceration rates simply being the consequence of a biased criminal justice system?
So far in this document we have discussed two different metrics that could, in principle, shed some light on the true nature and scale of the Muslim crime problem: crime rates and incarceration rates. The first, as we have noted, do not exist for Muslims as a group, and the second are not easy to interpret. We consider it worth pointing out here that the relationship between them may also be somewhat counterintuitive. We expect, intuitively, that a group with disproportionately high crime rates will also have disproportionately high incarceration rates. But the extent to which the law enforcement apparatus is actually brought to bear on a given group is also of relevance to this analysis.
If all Muslims in prison were to be let out of prison, then the Muslim incarceration rate would fall to zero, so this indicator would suggest a complete lack of criminality on the part of Muslims. But the release of approximately 10,000 Muslims with criminal records into the country at large would, fairly obviously push up the Muslim crime rate by some margin, making Muslims appear more criminal as seen via this metric (however it were deduced). Conversely, putting all Muslims in prison permanently would see the Muslim crime rate fall to zero, suggesting zero Muslim criminality with this metric, but pushing the Muslim prison population to 2.4 million, suggesting absolute criminality with the other.
The point of this slightly odd thought experiment is to suggest that, if the policing of a given community starts to weaken and become more permissive in some regard, then, all other things being equal, its incarceration rate will fall while its crime rate rises. And, as we have argued above, there are already good grounds for believing that the police have become less than completely assiduous in pursuing Muslim criminals, at least in certain respects. As such, we may surmise that the only concrete indicator we have of relative Muslim criminality (their relative incarceration rate) is lower than it would be if the law were applied evenly, and that the one that is invisible to us (their relative crime rate) is higher than it would otherwise be.
Let us put the point more concretely. If the British police dropped all their concerns about appearing ‘racist’, and were given the powers they need to adequately address FGM, pimping, and other crimes that are ‘culturally sensitive’, and that they have therefore edged away from until now, how many more criminal Muslims would be in prison, and how much lower would Muslim crime therefore be? There is no way of answering this question precisely, and we do not propose to try. But there is clearly a strong possibility that huge amounts of Muslim crime are simply not registered by the criminal justice system at all, as they are not reported, offenders are never brought to justice, and the crimes themselves simply disappear into the unknowable Muslim-specific ‘dark figure’, which, we suggest, is almost certainly much greater than for other communities.
Note that we do not imply by the foregoing that the police are bringing all wrongdoers to justice when the wrongdoers in question happen to be non-Muslims. Rather we suggest that a relative slackness with respect to the application of the law to certain Muslim groups will result in the one firm, quantitative indicator of Muslim crime we have (incarceration rates) underestimating the scale of the problem. Coupled with an admittedly impressionistic perception of the prevalence of Muslim crime picked up, rightly or wrongly, from the mainstream media, it is hard to resist concluding that Muslim crime is a) rampant and b) substantially unaddressed. The absence of any reliable relative crime rate data for Muslims, their already-high incarceration rate, and the existence of good reason to believe that they enjoy, in some respects at least, an ill-deserved legal impunity with respect to extremely serious crimes: all these factors serve to strengthen this conclusion. The disproportionality in incarceration rates for Muslims is, at present, a factor of three.4 But perhaps it should be a factor of five, or ten, or twenty. How can we possibly know?
We must maintain a position of agnosticism here. As already stated, we strongly suspect that, though overrepresented in the prison population by a large margin, Muslims are almost certainly still underrepresented relative to what we will call their ‘true state’, i.e. that which would obtain if they enjoyed no special treatment. However, this should not be taken to imply that all Muslims are criminals destroying our society from within. It is, rather, a friendly shot across the bows of the relevant authorities. Nature abhors a vacuum, and an informational vacuum that pertains to the criminality of a problematic religious minority, whose relationship with the rest of the country is already rather strained, cannot be in anyone’s best interests, theirs or ours.
Let us reiterate here that the types of crime with respect to which Muslims enjoy a certain degree of impunity are hardly trifling matters. FGM, sexually enslaving underage girls, the dealing of hard drugs and associated crimes of violence, ‘honour’ violence, and a constellation of offences relating to inciting violence and/or insurrection against the British state, people, and armed forces: these crimes are not exactly on a par with parking on double-yellow lines or casually throwing away a crisp packet. Even if we turn to terrorism itself, there are undoubtedly Muslims in the UK today whom the security services could pull in and have charged for terrorism-related offences if keeping them under surveillance and building up intelligence on their networks were not deemed to be of greater value. How many such Muslims might there be? 10? 50? 100? We have no way of knowing, but the point is that even with respect to terrorism (for valid reasons, in this case), we cannot assume that the numbers we see in prison are reflective of the true scale of the problem. Hence the informational vacuum to which we have already alluded.
Next: “Some Pre-Emptive Responses to Predicted Objections” and “Conclusions”
Notes:
| 1 | Nicolai Sennels (born 1976) is a psychologist and the author of ‘Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s Experiences from Copenhagen Municipality’ (Free Press Society, 2009). The book describes the psychological mechanisms leading to high Muslim crime rates and hostile, parallel Muslim societies. It also explains why integration of Muslims into Western societies is doomed to failure. His work is based on his experience in Copenhagen youth prison where he had around 150 Muslim and 100 Danish clients. It is on the basis of the comparisons this client pool allowed that he draws a psychological profile of the Muslim mind. His controversial work was well received by the Danish magazine for professional psychologists, which stated that the book was ‘a provoking eye-opener, convincing and with concrete examples,’ and the magazine for professional teachers of teenagers stated that ‘Nicolai Sennels’ conclusions and critical analysis concerning our effort to help criminal youth deserve wide attention.’ Sennels regularly writes articles for Danish newspapers and internet magazines, of which ‘Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences’ and ‘Sexual Abuse Widespread among Muslims’ (both available online) are the best known. Sennels can be contacted through his homepage: www.nicolaisennels.dk. | |
| 2 | “Religious Muslim boys more violent” | |
| 3 | The methods in question are victim surveys (crime viewed from the victim’s perspective) and self-report studies (crime viewed from the perpetrator’s perspective). Both are useful criminological tools in certain contexts and to certain extents, particularly the former. A discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these studies is beyond the scope of this document, but suffice it to say here that there is no reason to believe that they currently shed any light on that part of the dark figure that concerns us, or even that they are ever likely to do so. | |
| 4 | A figure which is already difficult to interpret, as we have noted. |
