Still reeling from a suicide attack on their embassy in Pakistan this week, Danes were questioning on Wednesday whether their government's foreign policy was at fault for being too aggressive.
"It always carries a cost to be active in the world's hot-spots," said Tony Brems Knudsen, an assistant professor of international politics at the University of Aarhus in western Denmark. "And when you choose to be at the forefront of the ‘war on terror’, you expose yourself greater risks," he told AFP.
Denmark, which saw its embassy in Islamabad struck by a suicide bomber on Monday, has since 2001 pursued what many experts and critics describe as an aggressive foreign policy.
The centre-right coalition government of Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen that came to power that year has been one of Washington's most loyal allies in the "war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been an outspoken defender of "Western values".
Most notably, the government has refused to apologise for the publication of blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (PTUI Peace Be Upon Him), which since 2006 have sparked violent protests worldwide and are believed to have provoked Monday's deadly attack.
"Pursuing such an active policy carries a high price," Islamic expert Joergen Baek Simonsen told AFP, insisting there was little the government could do in the short term to dampen the animosity many Muslims feel towards Denmark. |