"Buy Danish" program worked

See, infidels can do nice things when we stick together.

While Danish milk products were dumped in the Middle East, fervent rightwing Americans started buying Bang & Olufsen stereos and Lego. In the first quarter of this year Denmark’s exports to the US soared 17%. The British writer Christopher Hitchens organised a buy-Danish campaign. Among the thousands of emails sent to Rose was one from an American soldier serving in Iraq. “He told me he was sitting in Iraq, watching a game of football and drinking a can of Carlsberg,” Rose said.

Rose is not the only person to have prospered from the crisis. Re-elected last year, Mr Rasmussen last week became Denmark’s longest-serving Liberal prime minister. Danish troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than this, his sceptical line on immigration appears to have been vindicated as other EU countries follow suit.

Well done all! I like this part too.

Denmark has now drifted to the right - as has neighbouring Sweden, which last week booted out its Social Democrat government. The chill hand of pragmatism has even arrived in Christiania, the Danish capital's hippy commune, as the government announced last week it intended to charge the hairy denizens rent.

At the moment the assimilationists - who insist immigrants should become more Danish - are in the ascendant. The government is considering Danish language tests for foreigners applying for a passport. If anything, the cartoon row has forced Europeans to reconsider what it is that makes them European.

"It provoked a debate here in Denmark about what are we really and what is our identity," Hans-Henrik Holm, a professor of international relations at Denmark's College of Journalism at Aarhus University said. "A lot of Danes know more today about Islam and religion. We have to wake up to the fact that we don't live in a Hans Christian Andersen quiet provincial country any more."

Now, go make more babies.