Assassination attempt on Lars Hedegaard

Lars Hedegaard is the president of the International Free Press Society and the editor of Dispatch-International, a superb weekly multi-language newspaper devoted to news that is suppressed by the politically correct mainstream media of the Western world. He is best known for having been charged with—and ultimately acquitted for—“hate speech” over simple factual statements he made about Islam several years ago.

Today a man of non-European appearance (I learned the description of the assailant from sources close to Hedegaard, not from the media) rang the bell of Hedegaard’s Copenhagen home. When Hedegaard opened the door the man attempted to shoot him in the head and missed. The Copenhagen Post (via Atlas Shrugs) reports that there were two assailants and that they were of Arab appearance. Here is a story from a European news site, news.com.au, which makes the murder attempt hardly seem to matter. After all, Hedegaard is an “anti-Islam writer,” and don’t people like that deserve whatever happens to them?

Gunman fires at Danish anti-Islam writer Lars Hedegaard

A GUNMAN has tried to shoot a Danish writer and prominent critic of Islam, but the writer managed to fend him off and was not injured in the attack.

Police said Lars Hedegaard, who heads two groups that claim press freedom is under threat from Islam, was the target of the shooting.

In a brief statement, they said a roughly 25-year-old gunman rang the doorbell at the writer’s Copenhagen home and when he opened the door, the gunman fired a shot aimed at his head, but missed.

“After a scuffle the attacker fled. At this writing we do not know whether the police have apprehended him,” the Danish Free Press Society said.

Hedegaard, 70, heads both the Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society. He was fined 5000 kroner ($875) in 2011 for making a series of insulting and degrading statements about Muslims.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt condemned the attack. “It is even worse if the attack is rooted in an attempt to prevent Lars Hedegaard to use his freedom of expression,” she told Danish news agency Ritzau.
Denmark Shooting

Danish police search the scene after the shooting. Picture: AP

Hedegaard has expressed support for a range of outspoken Islam critics in Europe, including Swedish artist Lars Vilks and Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders.

“Failed attack on my friend and Islam critic Lars Hedegaard in Denmark this morning. My thoughts are with him. Terrible,” Mr Wilders tweeted.

The Free Press Society said it was “shaken and angry” over the attack, but “relieved that the perpetrator did not succeed”.

[end of article]

I first met Lars Hedegaard about four years ago in New York City and have seen him about once every year since then. He is a highly intelligent, engaging man. I Iast saw him and his Dispatch-International co-editor Ingrid Carlqvist last September when we and some other friends had lunch prior to attending a conference on the East Side hosted by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer where Lars spoke.

Pamela Geller, in the item linked at the beginning of this entry, describes the would-be assassins as an “enemies of free speech.” How typical of her. As a libertarian / right-liberal, and thus as a person who lives in a world of abstractions, she cannot conceptualize our Islamic enemies as people who want to kill us and destroy our civilization. No, they are merely “enemies of free speech.” They weren’t trying to murder Lars Hedegaard, they were just trying to take away his right of free speech. And because she believes not in ourselves as concrete human beings nor in our concrete civilization but only in the universal abstraction of freedom, she also believes in the freedom of Muslims to immigrate en masse into our civilization, thus enabling them to destroy it. The idea of excluding Muslims from the West by stopping their immigration hither is inconceivable to her.

However, in Geller’s favor, she does not always speak in terms of liberal abstractions. In her bus and subway ad campaign, she has nobly spoken of the need to take the side of “civilization” against “savages,” i.e. against jihadists. If only she would apply that principle to immigration policy and call for the exclusion of jihadists (and all observant Muslims, who are practically inseparable from jihadists) from America and the West.

- end of initial entry -

Zeno C. writes:

A minor correction, I believe that news.com.au is an Australian news site. Here is another article from a Copenhagen newspaper, which also focuses more on the “anti-Islam” stance of the victim than on the actual murder attempt, but at least describes the assailant as follows: “around 30 years of age and has dark skin and thick, dark hair.”

Robert Spencer writes:

Obviously Pamela Geller knows they were trying to murder a man. She was explaining why they were trying to murder him: for daring to speak out against Islam and jihad.

LA replies:

Yes, but she made it seem as if they tried to murder him for speaking out in favor of free speech. She wrote:

“[The would-be assassin] could have been a leftist, it could have been a Muslim, but it is certain that it was an enemy of free speech. Will this finally wake up Danish authorities, who subjected him to a sharia blasphemy trial in 2011 (more on that case here) to just how seriously the enemies of free speech are threatening the foundations of free society?”

However, I must make a correction. Geller also wrote in the same entry:

“Muslims tried to murder a man for speaking out against sharia and jihad, and the complicit enemedia has nothing to say.”

February 6

Kilroy M. writes from Australia:

You wrote: “Here is a story from a European news site, news.com.au.”

Minor quibble, but something that never ceases to amuse us Antipodeans: Austrian websites are typically written in German (or at Obama would have it, “Austrian”!) whereas ours are in English. Another dead give-away is that ours end in .au whereas Austrian ones end with <.at> (or <.eu>).

Nevertheless, given the rate of non-European immigration into the Old World, perhaps we are indeed becoming comparatively more European than Europe over time, and perhaps that may soon become an additional point of confusion!

LA replies:

Correction noted: “.au” means a website in Australia.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 05, 2013 10:17 AM | Send