On Monday, a book was published.
It's called "Aisha Rebel - Woman in a Clan" and tells the story of a 28-year-old woman with Iraqi background, raised here in Denmark.
Her father sold her for 50,000 kroner. The man who bought her poured boiling water over her stomach, raped her and trampled on her hands and feet so she would become disabled and couldn't leave him. When she became pregnant and found out it was a girl, she fled. She wouldn't pass it on. The family sent ten cars after her. She lives today in hiding under police protection, because her family believes she has brought shame upon them.
Notice the word.
Shame.
We'll need it again in a moment.
Under a post about the book, on a member of parliament's public profile, a woman wrote this comment -
"Sounds like Aisha is a made-up person written by white men like you."
One sentence. A woman in mortal danger, declared fictitious.
The woman behind the comment is named Aiysha Abu-Laban and is married to Isam B. When the press contacted her, she didn't answer questions but instead wrote that the witch-hunt against Muslims was well underway, that it was about a racist Zionist agenda, and that the only thing missing was the gas chambers.
The gas chambers...!? Ok. That escalated quickly.
The Minister for Church Affairs responded. Ida Auken wrote a post where she guaranteed that Aisha exists - she has met her herself - and retold her story, detail by detail. She wrote that Isam B's wife should be ashamed and used the wife's own profile picture accompanying the post. And she opened with the word "the Islamist", as if it were a title.
And then our friend, Isam B, wrote a letter.
The letter is skilful. That must be said, because it's true. He turns the minister's theology against her, searches in vain in the Sermon on the Mount for the verse where Jesus exposes a family, asks who actually sits at table with an extremist. It's rhetoric of high calibre, and whoever underestimates it has already lost.
But read the letter again. As I did. And this time don't look for what's there. Look for what's missing.
The comment, which the whole case springs from, is not quoted.
Not one word of it.
Not a single one.
Not one!?
It's referred to as "a comment that wasn't even directed at her" - five words that must carry that his own household publicly declared a persecuted woman fictitious. The gas chambers aren't mentioned. The Zionist agenda isn't mentioned. Boiling water, 50,000 kroner, the mosque, the private school, the ten cars threatening the woman's life - none of what the minister's post actually dealt with finds its way into the letter.
The letter responds extensively to the post's form.
But it flees from every single gram of its content.
This isn't the first time his texts are missing verses.
That's what we talked about with the song - "Sharia and Sunshine" or whatever it's called - in the Folk High School Songbook. Ramadan without obligation, without law, without consequence - what remained were dates and candles. Back then the whole system was cut out, so it could become *cosy*. Now the whole thing is cut out, so it can become *invisible*.
Same hand. Same clipboard. Same scissors. And what lies on the floor is every time the same -
The Law. The Coercion. The Woman.
In one place in the letter, Aisha does come up anyway. "The book's Aisha is real. The violence is real." Two sentences, delivered as magnanimity. But it's not magnanimity. It's a silent burial of what his own household claimed publicly, served as if it were a concession to his opponents.
And immediately after comes the move that should close the case - "the violence is not a Muslim problem, the violence is a human problem". The sentence is true as statistics and false as answer.
Because Aisha wasn't beaten by "a human being". She was SOLD by her father, OWNED by her husband, HUNTED by her clan and JUDGED by an honour system that has name, address and theology.
When you dissolve the specific into the universally human, the architecture disappears - and all that remains is just "a man who beats".
First her existence was denied. When that didn't hold, her category was dissolved. It's the same operation in two tempos.
Tell me. Don't you think he believes I can see it? What's being attempted with language? You needn't answer. But now you can too.
And then there's the word. I promised to return to it.
Shame appears twice in this case -
First time with Aisha - her family believes she has brought shame upon them. That's why she's in mortal danger. Second time with Minister Auken who writes that - "his wife should be ashamed". It's a reprimand for a public statement. There exists a shame that can cost a woman her life, and a shame that costs a comment a rebuke. The letter only has room for the latter.
Then the letter demands distance. The minister must distance herself from a wealthy man four degrees removed - a foundation, a think tank, a man on the platform X. And let me do what the letter demands of her, because it costs me nothing -
Frihedsbrevet has documented that Søren Toft-Jensen in a poll on X declared agreement that Islam should be fought "in the same way we fought the Nazis". I distance myself from that formulation without reservation. One analyses orders, one criticises systems, one defends one's country's arrangement with arguments, laws and borders - one does not wage war on people, and the Nazis were people. There Isam B points to something real.
But then see what happens with his own sentence - if the minister can't distance herself, he writes, she is "a hypocrite who demands of me what you won't model yourself".
The sentence is sharp. It's just aimed the wrong way. Because he demands distancing of her at four degrees' distance and doesn't deliver it at zero. Not from the denial of Aisha. Not from the gas chambers. Not from the agenda with exclamation mark in it. His own principle, applied to himself, strikes down the letter in one simple movement.
And then just two more things, because they must be included when one wants to be honest.
Isam B has genuinely been subjected to assault in Danish debate. A debater was convicted in a Danish court for his words about him. DR has retracted the old story about the bare shoulders. That belongs, and it's admitted without hesitation. And the minister's "the Islamist" as title, without argument, is beneath her level, and the picture she should have left alone. She herself handed him that handle the letter hangs on. But the letter calls the picture private and closes with the law - "One doesn't share others' private pictures. It's in the law." The picture is, however, her public profile picture. So. The law passage stands on nothing.
And finally what says most of all, and which I don't think he has seen himself. But which pleases me.
When he needed to defend himself, he reached out for two things -
The Sermon on the Mount and Danish law.
That is. The Christian ethical language and the secular legal order.
The open letter, the free accusation against a minister, the appeal to law over power. All of it inventory that Western civilisation has built - and of which he wouldn't own a single piece under the order his song attempted to rewrite into Danish domestic cosiness.
Because there one doesn't write open letters to the minister. There the minister has already had the last word.
He closes by saying he will remain standing.
He can safely do that.
It's not difficult to remain standing in a country where it's not yourself the ten cars are looking for.
Aisha is still running.
❤️🔥🪽
...
For the record: I know none of the people in this post. None of them know it exists before you do.
I'm interested in words.
And how they're used.
