Denmark’s prime minister, who has been denouncing Israel and threatening to organize sanctions against it, has now confessed that her country committed horrific crimes against people it conquered—crimes which fit the textbook definition of genocide.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen last week condemned Israel’s pursuit of Hamas terrorists in Gaza as “very violent” and “unacceptable.” She said Denmark is considering extending recognition to the non-existent “State of Palestine.”

Frederiksen also said that Denmark intends to take advantage of its term as head of the European Union to punish Israel for defending itself. She said she is now conferring with other EU members to impose “political pressure and sanctions” against both individual Israelis and “Israel as a whole.” 

The Danish prime minister even implicitly compared Israel’s pursuit of Hamas killers and gang-rapists to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In one of those ironic twists that seem to crop up a lot lately, Frederiksen’s blasts at Israel happened to coincide with new revelations about horrific abuses committed by Denmark against the indigenous Inuit people of Greenland.

The violent Danish conquest of Greenland was led by Erik the Red, a killer and slaveowner who had been banished from Iceland in the 10th century CE and went looking for new lands to plunder. Needless to say, Erik and his fellow-settlers did not ask permission from the native Inuits who had preceded them to Greenland by some 5,000 years.

Denmark’s abuse of the Inuits did not end with stealing their country. The Danes also stole some of their children.

Three years ago, Prime Minister Frederiksen acknowledged it was “heartless” and “inhumane” that the Danish government took 22 Inuit children from their families in 1951 and sent them to Denmark as part of an experiment in forced assimilation.

The prime minister said she was sorry about that, and awarded a token compensation payment of 250,000 kroner ($37,200) to each of the last six surviving victims.

After that episode, a government commission began investigating Denmark’s overall treatment of the Inuits. Three years have passed, and the commission reportedly is preparing to release its findings.

Apparently to get out ahead of the forthcoming report, Prime Minister Frederiksen last week issued another apology, this time for an even more widespread horror: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Danish doctors, acting at the instruction of their government, implanted birth control devices in an estimated 4,500 Inuit women and girls—some of them just 12 years old—without their knowledge or consent. That was half of Greenland’s population of fertile females. The purpose of the implantations was to limit the size of the Inuit population.

The prime minister did not use the word “genocide” in her remarks. But the government policy that she acknowledged amounted to exactly that.

“Genocide” is defined as actions that are “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

In her statement, Prime Minister Frederiksen also alluded to what she called “systematic discrimination and other failures and mistreatments.” She did not elaborate. Presumably the commission will.

It’s been 425 years since William Shakespeare penned the immortal line in Hamlet, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark…” 

Today, what’s rotten in the state of Denmark is the integrity of the country’s leaders. They point an accusing finger at Israel, while only belatedly and grudgingly acknowledging their own country’s genocidal actions—and failing to pay a single krone of restitution to the 4,500 victims of Denmark’s forced birth control policy.

What an upside-down world this is! A country that is not committing genocide is falsely accused of doing so, while a country that admits committing acts which are unquestionably genocidal simply mutters “sorry” and gets away without any consequences.

Dr. Medoff is the founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.