Five Danes have had to leave our country on the orders of the Immigration Department, says the cabinet of State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Sammy Mahdi. It concerns five supporters of the Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, who wanted to organize a Koran burning in Molenbeek. “A serious threat to public order in Belgium,” said Mahdi in consultation with the Ministry of the Interior.
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Five supporters of the Danish far-right politician Rasmus Paludan have been arrested in Brussels. They were in our country in connection with an announced Koran burning in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek. In consultation with Prime Minister De Croo and the Minister of the Interior Annelies Verlinden (CD&V), after questioning by the police, it was decided to refuse them stay on Belgian territory.
The cabinet of State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Sammy Mahdi does not want to name names, but said in a press release on Thursday afternoon that “hate preachers are never welcome in Belgium, regardless of where they come from.” The cabinet says that the Danes ‘pose a serious threat to public order in Belgium’ and are ‘supporters of a hate preacher’. They have left our country on the orders of the Immigration Department. Our sources confirm that the hate preacher in question is 38-year-old Danish politician Rasmus Paludan.
Rasmus himself was arrested in Paris, because he also wanted to organize a Quran burning on the Champs-Elysées. The French authorities took similar steps and ordered him to leave the territory. It is not clear where he now resides. At the end of October it was the same in Germany: there he was prevented from entering the country when he landed in Berlin. A day later he tried again, after which he was arrested and deported.
Paludan originally planned to travel to Sint-Jans-Molenbeek after Paris for a similar action. He announced that after there a fifth grade teacher was suspended for showing cartoons with a naked Muhammad. “We will burn a Koran in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek on November 12 for love for the Belgian people,” he wrote to the Belgian ambassador in Copenhagen. It was in this context that the five Danes stayed in Brussels.
Paludan is internationally known as a far-right agitator who uses incidents to add fuel to the fire. Last summer it came to heavy riots in Malmö, Sweden and the Danish Copenhagen, when Paludan and his entourage continued there with a Koran burning. The 38-year-old man of Danish-Swedish nationality also founded the party Stram Kurs (‘Harde Lijn’), but did not cross the electoral threshold in 2019. That same year, he was also convicted of racism. In June 2020, he was again sentenced to two months in prison for racism.
The five supporters left our country voluntarily on the orders of the Immigration Department and received a one-year entry ban. “Anyone who undermines the security of a society also undermines democratic rights,” said Minister of the Interior Annelies Verlinden (CD&V).
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