"We have had to admit that the Americans have not been as effective in their anti-terrorism efforts as we thought and that the threat against Denmark has grown"

The Danes have a point... David Headley launched his plot against the Danish newspaper using the U.S. as his "safe haven." India should be pretty PO'ed too since we inadvertantly let Headley help plan & support the Mumbai attacks.

We have had to admit that the Americans have not been as effective in their anti-terrorism efforts as we thought and that the threat against Denmark has grown,"

Uh huh...So you expect America to protect you and then whine when you find out Rasulullahhaha Obama is to wimpy to do it...
If you think Rasool will protect you, you are barking up the wrong tree...You will have to protect yourself...Sorry, but that's the way it is in America 2009...Maybe we will be lucky and get a regime change soon...The one we have now has trouble protecting a houseplant...
However, you may be eligible for some 'Obama-money'...It never hurts to ask...

You mean Islamic terrorism is a threat?

Oh, boy. It appears that President Obama will have to fly over to Denmark and "re-educate", "call out" and remind the Danish people that the United States is not at war with Islam. The Danes are just so Islamaphobic.

Well, in a globalized world it's hard to know how to stop undesired individuals from crossing borders. Perhaps the only way is to isolate the whole islamic world from the rest. The problem is just that they have already migrated in their millions to the western world.

Marisol,

I asked on one of the previous threads why my short comment has been removed, but you haven't reacted except removing also the enquiring posting. Am I banned? If so, why?

As long as we (the Danes) don't even consider stopping, or even limiting muzlem immigration, but keep on blabbering about the need to increase "integration efforts" and "stricter checks on American travelers" we are just as silly as your "president".

I'm disappointed in the Danes who want "stricter checks on American travelers to the country out of terrorism concerns."

Check them yourselves, when they arrive at the airport (Duh). See to the efficacy of your own laws, and if they need strengthening, strengthen them!

Do you think all terrorists come straight to you, from America? Well, they don't (Duh, again). It's likely that you send as many terrorists to America, as America sends to you. Stop whining about what America does do, and doesn't do for you.

"Two parties in Denmark's parliament are calling for stricter checks on American travelers to the country out of terrorism concerns."

Fine, but what are they doing about travelers from Moslem countries, and about travelers from the other EU countries, who can enter Denmark as easily as an Iowan enters Minnesota? The EU has a dozen times as many potential terrorists as the US, and the Islamic world hundreds of times as many. If it's o.k. to take special measures against Americans, why not against Moslems?

What a joke. The UK alone could field a battalion of aQ operatives.

[rolls_eyes]

We have had to admit that the Americans have not been as effective in their anti-terrorism efforts as we thought and that the threat against Denmark has grown," says Danish People's Party Justice Spokesman Peter Skaarup.
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You will *never* hear about this sort of thing from the "Obama has restored America's image in the world" types. At his election, I remember my concern over whether Europeans would, in the end, really be happy with an end to "Cowboy America"—or if that "Cowboy America", for all its crassness, tended to keep the communists, and the fascists, and the other uglies more or less at bay.

more:

According to Visit Denmark almost 500,000 Americans visit the country each year. One of those who twice this year availed himself of easy entry into the country was a man recently arrested in Chicago on charges of conspiracy to carry out an attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper....

We have had to admit that the Americans have not been as effective in their anti-terrorism efforts as we thought and that the threat against Denmark has grown," says Danish People's Party Justice Spokesman Peter Skaarup.
...............................

Americans—and other nations such as Britain and Germany that are, through years of lax policies, now *exporting* Jihad terror, should be *horrified* and angry over this.

As poster Seville844 notes, it is "...in a globalized world it's hard to know how to stop undesired individuals from crossing borders." This is very true. But it has to be a priority, and I'm not sure in the United States, at this point, that it is.

Thomas H. wrote:

As long as we (the Danes) don't even consider stopping, or even limiting muzlem immigration, but keep on blabbering about the need to increase "integration efforts" and "stricter checks on American travelers" we are just as silly as your "president".
...............................

This is also true.

In a security report released in September of 2006, PET, the Danish domestic intelligence agency, warned that the largest threat to Denmark, as in most European countries, comes from small, unsophisticated groups that are "inspired by al-Qaeda's global jihad ideology but can act autonomously and apparently without external control, support or planning".

On September 6, 2006, Danish police arrested nine suspects in the city of Odense, Denmark's third largest. According to authorities, the men had acquired material "to build explosives in connection with the preparation of a terror act." The suspects are believed to be mostly young second-generation Muslim immigrants of various ethnic origins living in Vollsmose, a poor neighborhood of Odense.
...............................

You can replace "Odense" here with London, or Paris, or Hamburg, or Milan, or Malmo, or Toronto, or Sydney, or Minneapolis, and tell much the same story.

Gravenimage above mentioned how Europe was longing for an end to "Cowboy America." Well, Europe got it with the wimp who is now in the White House. Congratulations, Europe, on being wrong again (this would be the same Europe that gave the world wonders like Marxism and Nazism, which started two world wars that America had to finish, which, with the exception of Finland, has never paid back billions upon billions of loans from the US, which had to be rebuilt by America through initiatives like the Marshall Plan, which could never have stood up to the Soviet Union while it existed without America's military and nuclear umbrella and which couldn't even solve a backyard brawl like the dissolution of Yugoslavia without eventually begging America to intervene and do something).

America should have a cowboy in the White House. Cowboys are intelligent without being intellectual. They're simple without being simplistic. They are straight forward and don't see seventeen shades of gray when they don't exist. They'll stand beside you when your fair-weather friends desert you and they understand the supreme virtue of action. Every free nation, not just America, should have a cowboy-type leader. Cowboys should be looked upon as a positive, though it's not surprising that most of Europe and, sadly, a good portion of America don't grasp this. They're too sophisticated to.

Would that mean that Sweden would also have to come to the party?

Two months ago I was able to travel by train from Malmo to Copenhagen over the Oresund bridge without a passport check at either end.

Facilitated by the Schengen Agreement, I presume, even though I have only a Downunder passport.

Victor Hanson's article "Where Has the Thrill Gone?" is a devastating review of Obama the President.
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/

"With Obama in the White House and Holder at the Justice Department, the Danes are on their own, and they know it." - Robert

What the Danes are doing is questioning the usefulness and safety of the Visa Waiver Program(VWP). This dangerous and deadly program was installed by the Reagan administration in 1986 and should have been dismantled after 9/11. On the contrary Bush expanded the program in 2006 despite reasonable and well-founded criticism:

"Critics blasted Bush's plan as an expansion of a dangerous loophole in the nation's effort to secure its borders. Several terrorists — including shoe-bomber Richard Reid and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui — boarded planes to the USA with passports from visa-waiver countries.

"That's a step in the wrong direction," said Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general at the Homeland Security Department. "We ought to be ending the visa-waiver program, not expanding it. There's a reason why terrorists are keen to obtain passports from visa-waiver countries: They don't have to undergo extensive security checks."

In September, the Government Accountability Office found that "stolen passports from visa-waiver countries are prized travel documents among terrorists, criminals and immigration-law violators."

Bush however, following the advice of such bastions of intelligent analysis as the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc., thought expansion of the VWP a good idea.

To see where the Right(the entirety of) stands on the issue today, here are a few articles:

FrontPage Magazine see Question #5

CATO Institute

Heritage Foundation

The Danes with their ultra liberal immigration policies began the journey down this road long ago. Just because we have a loyal subject of the Saudi Prince in the white house
doesn't excuse their inaction. Maybe several hundred cars burned in the streets will be the result. Viva La France.

Diddums, diddums. Poor little old Denmark will have to get up and look after itself. My heart bleeds for you. You have let so many immigs into your land you need to worry more about them than American tourists. Close your eyes, cluch your teddies and pray.

rico said: "The Danes with their ultra liberal immigration policies began the journey down this road long ago."

Actually we have pretty strict immigration policies at the moment. But yeah, it's a legacy of earlier irresponsibility.

meekee said: "Poor little old Denmark will have to get up and look after itself. My heart bleeds for you."

Personally I'm more concerned about the Danes who are bleeding and dying in the Helman province, due to our NATO membership. I'm beginning to think it would be better for us if we leave NATO at some point. The way things are now, we are so close to the US that our foreign policy is almost completely synchronized with the US. So whenever the US is at war or in conflict somewhere, we are there also.

Sure we have the benefit of the protection of a superpower(if the US can still be referred to as that, it's weak economy taken into consideration), but there is clearly a price to be paid for that protection. That price is that whatever problem the US has, also becomes our problem. And whenever the US screw up in f.ex. Afghanistan, it can cost the lives of our soldiers, because the US de facto is the driving force behind the occupation of that country.

Denmark alone can never win, nor can it ever lose that war. The same obviously goes for all the other small countries in Afghanistan, Estonia, Slovenia, Greece ect. Our soldiers can be second to none, but all sacrifices will be in vain if the big countries, mainly the US, make political and military errors that makes it a failed mission.

So I think we should leave the obsolete cold war organization that is NATO. Our neighbours the Swedes have been neutral for 200 years. If they can do it, so can we.

Wellington said: "Swedish neutrality before and during WWII fed Hitler's war machine with its iron ore. Hardly a neutrality worthy of approbation. Sweden's "neutrality" also led it into leading the international assault against American involvement in Vietnam, with bogus charges of American atrocities."

I know the Swedish role in WW2 is not a very admirable one seen from a moral point of view. However we are talking about a 200 year period of neutrality, from the Napoleonic wars until today. Most of the time there were no such dirty deals.

With regard to the Vietnam war thing, I honestly don't know what to believe. I have never studied that conflict in detail. I would like to say though, that whatever one might think of the Swedish role in that conflict, they sure had an independent stance. I bet that wasn't very popular across the Atlantic.

At times I have the same feeling about the French, I have a sneaking suspicion that the real reason why so many Americans can't stand the French, has got something to do with the fact that they actually dare to have a different approach to many things in international affairs. This is in contrast to f.ex. the UK, Denmark and many other proamerican countries. Otherwise it's hard to understand why there is such a strong aversion against France in the US - I mean it's not like the two countries have ever been enemies.

Wellington said: "But, if your fellow Danes decide to withdraw from NATO, so be it. You're free to go. But with such a decision comes consequences. Are you ready for all of them? --- After all, it's not very much farther from Moscow to Copenhagen as it is from Moscow to Warsaw."

Yes, well I'm not saying it's without complications to do such a thing. I'm just tired of us getting involved in conflicts from which we have very little - if anything - to gain. In an alliance all countries have to assist one and other, but because the US is the biggest country, it's like a huge magnet attracting trouble.

A lot of power can deter potential enemies, that’s true, but it can also make a country the target of attacks from powers, organizations and ideologies that are interested in altering the balance of power in the world. It doesn't make much sense to attack a small country like Denmark, it simply isn't worth it (apart from some exceptional scenario). In other words, it's much more likely that Danish soldiers will be sent out to some part of the world where the US has been attacked, than for the opposite to occur. So it's a natural question to ask whether it's really still in our interest to be so closely aligned with the US.

Of course one should be realistic. Russia is a potential threat. Actually Denmark has historically had very good relations with Russia, it's one of the few major powers in Europe with which we have never had any major wars. But that is obviously no guarantee for a future of peace with that country. There is a territorial dispute between us and them because both countries claim ownership to the North Pole. Denmark argues that the Lomonosov Ridge is in fact an extension of Greenland and thus the North Pole belongs to us:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomonosov_Ridge

The Russians are claiming the North Pole to be theirs. Other countries are also involved in the dispute. BTW we also have a dispute with our fellow NATO members, the Canadians, over an island called Hans Island:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Island

Until these issues are resolved, I think we should stay put.

But when it's over, we should move towards a closer military cooperation with our Nordic neighbours, the Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. Together I believe we can form a very strong military block. All countries in the North are rich and advanced. We share common interests. I agree that all alone, it would probably be a bit too risky for us. But together with our other Nordic neighbours, I have no fears. The Nordic countries have not been united since the days of the Kalmar Union, when we were the biggest country in Europe (in terms of area). It's about time we find a way to unite again.

All my best wishes to you and your country aswell.