Lars Hedegaard Is a Fighter and a Hero. The Supine Danish Dhimmi Media...Not So Much

Bruce Bawer has the skinny on yesterday's failed assassination attempt--and the media's efforts, as per usual, to slander the outspoken individual targeted by someone who could not abide his "insolence":

It was right out of Three Days of the Condor. Hedegaard opened the door and was handed a package by the guy, who then drew a pistol and shot at him. Miraculously, the gunman missed – just barely. While he fumbled with his weapon, trying to get off another shot, Lars acted fast, striking his assailant, who dropped the gun. Lars tried to shut the door, but the perpetrator stuck his foot in and managed to push it open again and to pick up his pistol. The two men struggled, and the goon finally took it on the lam. Afterwards, Lars told an interviewer that he was not scared but angry – angry to have been attacked in his own country, obviously for the offense of speaking his mind (and the truth). “If they think they can scare me, they’re thoroughly mistaken,” he said. The police, in their public alert on the case, have described the assailant as “a man around 25 with a foreign background.” (Interestingly, officials at the Copenhagen Zoo, into which two persons of interest were seen fleeing, told reporters that police officials, in describing the suspect to them, had actually used the word Pakistani.)

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. 

Well. The good thing is that Lars Hedegaard lives, and has vowed to persist in his courageous efforts to resist the Islamization of Europe. The bad thing is that his Muslim enemies are also alive and well and as determined as ever to wreak their monstrous havoc – and that their abettors in the media and elsewhere have lost none of their shameful readiness to relativize jihad and tear down heroes.