Kudos to the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page and Editorial Board (especially Dorothy Rabinowitz) for publishing Lars Hedegaard’s defiant tocsin of looming free speech calamity, “The Assassin at the Door”
After laying out the details of the assassination attempt, Hedegaard updates us on the fact that the would be assassin has not been apprehended, and the likely motivation for his attack:
However, everybody who has commented on the incident has assumed that the motive is political. Some people don’t like what I have been saying or writing in recent years, and they want to silence me. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what may have spurred the gunman or those who may have sent him.
For years I have been a campaigner for free speech—since 2004 as president of Denmark’s Free Press Society. I have been an outspoken critic of Islamic supremacism and of attempts to impose Islamic Shariah law in Denmark and the West. Together with my Swedish colleague Ingrid Carlqvist, I have recently launched a Swedish-language weekly newspaper called Dispatch International—to the great dissatisfaction of the Swedish mainstream media, which are probably the most politically correct in the Western world and are in absolute agreement on every issue of any consequence.
Dispatch International is critical of mass immigration to Sweden and Denmark from third-world countries and takes a dim view of Islam. As a consequence, we have been reviled as “racist.” We are not. We simply insist on our right to defend freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and individual and sexual equality. We also insist on our right to criticize religious fanatics of every stripe who try to impose theocratic laws and customs on free societies.
Hedegaard places the failed attempt on his life in its tragic contemporary Western European context of similar Islamic depredations, before concluding with characteristic defiance.
What’s next? Unfortunately, the attempt on my life is one in a wave of political assassinations or attempted assassinations that has swept Europe since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his so-called fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. Some have been killed—among them the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn and Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Others, like writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have been forced to flee Europe or go into hiding. I am determined not to be silenced, come what may. I refuse to live in a world ruled by the gun.
Read it all.
And now, at last, perhaps that other News Corp entity, Fox News will gird its loins and interview Lars Hedegaard, as Michael Coren of Sun News, Canada, has already done—twice.
