More detailed account of Hedegaard assassination attempt

It’s from the Daily Mail:

A writer and outspoken critic of Islam narrowly escaped being shot dead after he opened his door to a would-be assassin posing as a delivery man at his home in Denmark.

The gunman rang the doorbell of 70-year-old Lars Hedegaard’s apartment in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, under the pretext of delivering a parcel, but when the writer opened his front door the hitman pulled out a weapon and fired a shot that just missed Mr Hedegaard’s head.

According to Mr Hedegaard, who described how the bullet ‘flew past’ his right ear, said the sniper fled after the writer punched him in the face causing him to drop his gun.

Mr Hedegaard, who heads up a group that claims press freedom is under threat from Islam, said the attack had left him shaken but not injured.

Police in Copenhagen confirmed they were searching for the suspect, described as a ‘foreign’ man aged between 20 and 25.

Mr Hedegaard said of the shock attack: ‘The bullet flew past my right ear, after which I attacked him and punched him in the face, which made him lose the gun.’

The gunman then fled the scene, he said.

Hedegaard heads the Free Press Society in Denmark and its international offshoot, the International Free Press Society. He is also among the publishers of a weekly anti-Islam newsletter. [LA replies: Dispatch-International is a broadsheet newspaper published in Swedish, Danish, German, and English (though the English version is only online, not in print, unfortunately).]

In 2011, he was convicted of hate speech and fined 5,000 kroner ($1,000) for making a series of insulting and degrading statements about Muslims.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt condemned what she called a ‘despicable’ act.

‘It is even worse if the attack is rooted in an attempt to prevent Lars Hedegaard to use his freedom of expression,’ she said. [LA replies: Another liberal! She suggests that preventing Hedegaard from using his freedom of expression would be worse than murdering him. For liberals, rights and freedom are more important than existence itself.]

- end of initial entry -

Max P. writes:

First I would like to wish you well. I feel bad reading about your health issues, but have respect for the positive manner in which you seem to take all your pain and ailments. I feel somewhat embarrassed because I complain about things in life that happen to me that are not even remotely comparable to what you must be going through. You are a model of resilience.

In regards to your post about Lars Hedegaard, I found these two quotes as reported in the Daily Mail to be incongruent:

“In 2011, he was convicted of hate speech and fined 5,000 kroner ($1,000) for making a series of insulting and degrading statements about Muslims.”

“Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt condemned what she called a ‘despicable’ act. ‘It is even worse if the attack is rooted in an attempt to prevent Lars Hedegaard to use his freedom of expression,’ she said.”

So does this mean we should expect to see Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt beavering away to eliminate Denmark’s hate speech laws that in her words are “rooted in an attempt to prevent Lars Hedegaard to use his freedom of expression?”

LA replies:

That is funny. Perhaps the explanation for the prime minister’s obvious contradiction is the one I already offered. When she said that the attack was despicable because it involved an attempted infringement of Hedegaard’s freedom of expression, she said that because, as a liberal, she’s incapable of getting seriously indignant about the (attempted) murder of a human being. In order to feel indignation, she must see the attack not as an attempt to take away a man’s life, but as an attempt to take away his rights. Because liberals don’t care about existence; they only care about rights, namely the rights to freedom and equality. So, needing to feel and to appear indignant in response to this crime, she used the language of freedom of expression, not realizing that it contradicted the years’-long effort by her own government to punish Hedegaard as a criminal because he used his freedom of expression to criticize Islam.

Max P. replies:

I had to reread your entry and your reply to me a couple of times, but it finally occurred to me that you might have hit the proverbial nail on the head. In reply to my initial email, you wrote:

” When she said that the attack was despicable because it involved an attempted infringement of Hedegaard’s freedom of expression, she said that because, as a liberal, she’s incapable of getting seriously indignant about the (attempted) murder of a human being. In order to feel indignation, she must see the attack not as an attempt to take away a man’s life, but as an attempt to take away his rights. Because liberals don’t care about existence; they only care about rights, namely the rights to freedom and equality.”

And thus we have hate crimes laws. Your statement really makes sense in light of how crime is viewed today. It’s not enough that the murderer of a minority or homosexual is convicted and sentenced for murder, especially if the murderer is heterosexual and European. They must be punished above and beyond because they must have targeted their victim due solely to the victim’s minority status, thus denying him equality and freedom. And since equality and freedom are the highest ideals, any attack on either must be vigorously punished.

Since minorities are innocent until proven guilty when it comes to matters of race, their crimes against whites are not viewed as the denial of equality and freedom, and thus, are only treated as normal, random criminality that is bound to occur in a society with a certain level of population. These murders, with no obvious intent to deny the victim his right of equality, are an acceptable loss.

LA replies:

Also, regarding existence versus rights, I have said many times that the liberal pursuit of the right of equal freedom, which takes the practical form of the pursuit of the elimination of all discrimination, must result in the destruction of all particular things that exist. This is because the existence of any particular thing, or of any class of particular things, necessarily involves discrimination between that thing, or that class of things, and all other things or classes of things. Therefore, if it is pursued consistently, the elimination of all discrimination, which is liberals’ highest goal, must result in non-existence. Liberalism is anti-existence. The only thing that prevents liberalism from literally destroying all particular things is that liberals, by means of various unprincipled exceptions to their own liberalism, decline to carry out the liberal program consistently. But to the extent that the liberal program is carried out consistently, its destructive consequences are thoroughgoing and comprehensive. Of all modern ideologies, including Communism and Nazism, liberalism is the most radical and extreme.

February 6

D. Bowen writes:

The Daily Mail story says:”the sniper fled after the writer punched him in the face causing him to drop his gun.”

Sniper? Really? A gunman who fires from the open, at point blank range, while still missing his mark is now called a sniper? Just further proof of the complete ignorance of modern journalist in matters concerning firearms and marksmanship.

LA replies:

Agreed, it’s a ridiculous error. But I think the ignorance shown is much more broadreaching than on specialized knowledge of firearms. It’s an ignorance of the basic meaning of words.

At the same time, the Daily Mail is not typical of today’s papers. In its sloppiness it is in a class by itself.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 05, 2013 04:15 PM | Send