With this famous line in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Marcellus speaks to an ill befalling the Danish state. That line came to mind with the recent, tragic terrorist attacks in Copenhagen directed toward a free-speech conference and then a synagogue hosting a bat mitzvah by a hate-spewing Islamist who is purported to have sworn allegiance to ISIS on the Internet.
Unlike the play, though, I don't think Denmark today is simmering in a stew of corruption and misrule; rather, like many Western countries (including ours), it has been the victim of its own tolerance in the face of radicalization.
But something else also came to mind — something that was brought to the attention of my colleague, Jessica Vaughan, by a journalist several weeks ago, which at the time was a curiosity, albeit one with somewhat ominous overtones:
Toward the middle of December, Honduran newspapers reported the apprehension, by border police, of three Danish citizens who had entered the southern part of the country illegally.
According to the report, the Danes were Mohamed Shykh Abdullah, 34; Abdifatah Daud Sheikhdair, 32; and Abduldahi Abdi Jumbar, 38. One can surmise, with no stretch to the boundaries of probability, that they were originally from the Horn of Africa, quite possibly Somalia, home of the Islamic extremist group al Shabaab.
The report produces many troubling questions: Why would Danes feel the need to enter Honduras illegally when they are entitled to legitimate visa-free travel to that country for up to three months? Why would Danish citizens go to Honduras, awash in crime and poverty and an unlikely tourist spot, when in their own country they are entitled to a host of social benefits, including free education, etc.?
The answer might be that they were merely in transit through Honduras, en route to a more likely location: the United States. But why travel that way, which smacks of smuggling and illegitimacy, when, as in Honduras, Danes may enter the United States without a visa, courtesy of the Visa Waiver Program? Could the answer to that question be: In order to enter our country undetected? If so, one wonders what motives might have been at play. They couldn't be good ones.
The article doesn't discuss what happened to these three men. Let us hope that, at the time they were apprehended, security officials at the American embassy in Tegucigalpa took sufficient interest to get to the bottom of these disturbing questions.