They started with 50. Now they say they’re 18,000

They started with 50. Now they say they’re 18,000

In 1996 there were fewer than 50 of them. Today, according to the organizers, up to 18,000 walked through Copenhagen. From Dronning Louises Bro to the Imam Ali Mosque.

Look at the curve. This is how it happens. First a handful. Then a few hundred. Then it fills a bridge, a district, a capital. A little at a time, until it is no longer a little.

And let me be fair, because fairness is the point. There is nothing strange about them holding this mourning procession. They have done it as part of their faith for more than a thousand years. It is theirs, and they believe in it. There is nothing strange about that at all.

What should stop us is the other half. There is nothing strange about Europe allowing it either, and that is exactly the problem. Europe allows it because Europe has forgotten who it is. A people that remembers what it stands for does not need to ban anything, it simply knows where its own line runs. We have lost that. And so the issue was never them. The issue is us.

Now look at what actually moved through the streets. Men in front. Women in the second row.

That is not a detail, that is the whole point. It is a view of women set into a system and marched out into the public square, in a city where generations fought for women and men to stand as equals.

The real question is not whether people may believe what they want. They may. The question is why our capital should cultivate a political law-religion that commemorates a 7th-century power struggle by dividing people by sex on Nørrebrogade.

One of the organizers is the Imam Ali Mosque, repeatedly described as the Iranian regime’s extended arm in Denmark. The same regime that hangs women and young men from cranes.

We are not importing culture. We are importing a system. And we let it grow, not because they are strong, but because we forgot why we were.

First a little. Then a lot. Then too late.