Denmark is renowned for high taxes, a welfare state, and a happy populace, qualities that have drawn admiration from many journalists and other liberals.  But its status as the showcase for enlightened big government (what American liberals always love to pretend they will bring if only the electorate will permit) may be in jeopardy.  Niclas Rolander reports for Bloomberg:

Denmark won't allow any refugees into the country this year under a United Nations program and will seek flexibility in determining how many may resettle in the future instead of a set quota, the Ministry of Immigration and Integration said.

Since 1989, Denmark has pledged to take 500 refugees a year selected by the UN for resettlement. The program is separate from European Union efforts to distribute migrants among member states, which has encountered fierce opposition from countries including Hungary.

Denmark is not calling a permanent halt to refugees, but it is establishing the critical principle that acceptance of refugees depends on the ability of the host country to assimilate them.

"It's hard to predict how many refugees and migrants will show up at the border to seek asylum, and we know it may be hard to integrate those who arrive here," Danish Minister of Immigration and Integration Inger Stojberg said in a statement on the UN program on Saturday[.]

There is an unspoken corollary to this position: refugees who come from cultures that make assimilation difficult cannot be accepted in large numbers.  And in the background of that corollary is the "fact on the ground" of neighborhoods populated by unassimilated Muslims, so hostile to the host nation that police and firefighters consider their neighborhoods "no-go zones."

With Muslim immigrant communities, time does not heal:

A new study has found Muslims born in Denmark feel more fury at Western foreign intervention, and are more inclined to help Muslims by violent means, than foreign-born people who migrated from conflict zones.

An international team of researchers, led by Milan Obaidi of Sweden's Uppsala University, conducted two surveys in order to identify signs of victimisation-by-proxy – whereby, in its most extreme form, Muslims born in Europe who have never lived outside the continent become so angry at the treatment of Muslims abroad that they consider carrying out acts of violence. ...

Compared with Muslim immigrants, Denmark-born Muslims scored higher on most predictors of violence, and more strongly identified with Muslims across the world.

Muslims born in Denmark also "perceived Western foreign policy as more unjust, felt more group-based anger and showed stronger intentions to support Muslims by nonviolent means," according to the paper, which reported that anger predicts support for violence.

Residents of the capital, Copenhagen, need only cross the Øresund Bridge to Malmö, Sweden to find Muslim no-go zones – or, as Swedish police prefer to say, "vulnerable areas."

The current iteration of Islam, a product of decades of agitation by the Muslim Brotherhood and funding of radical clergy by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf petrostates, is triumphalist, not assimilationist.  The attitude is that the West needs to be brought into the Ummah and turned into Muslims by any means necessary.  Currently the most practical means is not conquest, but rather immigration.  It even has a name: hijra.

So while Denmark's step is small, it is in the right direction.  And it comes from a country renowned for its niceness.

Perhaps Europe will not fall to Islam and convert St. Peter's into a mosque, as was done to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople – now renamed Istanbul.  The future Islamic name for St. Peter's; Tome; or Copenhagen, for that matter, remains unclear, at least outside the inner circles of the Muslim Brotherhood, where they think in terms of centuries.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky