I arrived in Amsterdam last week for a brief visit, an excited acquaintance informed me of the day’s big news: the highly popular Queen Beatrix, who has been on the throne for more than three decades, had just announced her intention to abdicate in favor of her imperially bland son Willem-Alexander. The first thought that came to mind when I heard the tidings was Her Majesty’s disgraceful conduct after the 2004 jihadist butchering of Theo van Gogh. Refusing to attend the funeral of the accomplished author, journalist, and filmmaker, Beatrix instead rushed off to a Moroccan youth center to assure those present that she was their pal. According to Reuters, Beatrix didn’t want to leave the throne until she was sure “that anti-immigrant, euroskeptic politician Geert Wilders, of whom she disapproved, was in no danger of assuming real political influence….Wilders’ poor showing at the last election and loss of influence in politics, could well have contributed to her decision to abdicate.” Willem-Alexander, whom van Gogh once described as something of a royal dummy, is no Wilders fan either, sneering in 2007, apropos of the politician, that “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” (The dim-bulb prince appeared not to grasp that under the rules of the Netherlands’ constitutional monarchy, it’s his job, not that of an elected official like Wilders, to keep his mouth shut.)....
.....No sooner had I returned home to Scandinavia that the news came. My longtime friend Lars Hedegaard, a fearless critic of Islam, founder of Denmark’s Free Press Society, and defendant in the most disgraceful trial in postwar Danish history, had just escaped being killed by a thug who came to the door of his home in Copenhagen pretending to be a mailman. The incident took place at about 11:00 on Tuesday morning. The would-be perpetrator was wearing a standard mailman’s uniform.....
.....As with the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, journalists have taken the attempt to end Hedegaard’s life as an excellent occasion to smear the victim. A subhead that appeared both in an article in Aftenposten credited to Kjetil Hanssen and the Norwegian Telegrambyrå, and in an article in VG credited to Bjørn-Martin Nordby and Harald Berg Sævereid, refers to Lars as a “krass” critic of Islam – krass being a word that can mean outspoken, harsh, or (yes) crass. Both articles (which were curiously full of such similarities) described Lars as “head of the so-called Free Press Society, a controversial association” – the controversy, of course, being that many members of the Danish media and academic elite think that the press shouldn’t be so free when the topic is Islam. Both articles further noted that Lars had “traveled around with Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who created [or caused] riots when he drew the Prophet Muhammed as a dog.” Vilks, in other words, was responsible for riots against his work, and Lars – well, guilt by association, you see. Similarly, Politiken described Lars as “the controversial commentator.” And NRK radio chose to identify Lars by saying he’d been “fined several times” for criticizing Islam – when, in fact, a lower court had fined him once, in a decision that the Supreme Court later overturned.....
Read all of Bruce Bawer's article: Lars Hedegaard Escapes Jihadist Assassination Attempt
