Mogens Camre, a former member of parliament for the far-right Danish People’s Party, which came in second in the recent general election, has been fined for insulting Muslims on his Twitter blog.
Camre compared Muslims to Nazis, and he literally paid the price — he had to pay a fine of 8,000 Danish kroner (just over 1,000 euros).
It is important to note that this is not only a legal precedent, but also a political one. The case shows that leading Islamophobic forces in Europe have changed their tactics in attacking Muslims. In order to avoid being accused of fascism, Nazism and the like, they have started to present Islam as the ideology of a new fascism (the term «Islamo-fascism» has even been coined) and to present themselves as defenders of freedom and tolerance against it. However, the Camre incident shows that such manipulation of terms does not go unnoticed in Denmark, at least not in such a crude and open form.