DEFENDING THE WEST
New York Times sides with jihad
Exclusive: Pamela Geller blasts newspaper for 'assassinating' victim's character
A Muslim in Denmark recently tried to assassinate freedom fighter Lars Hedegaard. Now the New York Times has done its part by assassinating Hedegaard’s character, smearing him in a notably belated piece on the attempt on the Danish activist’s life.
It’s a pity that lily-livered cowards at the New York Times like Andrew Higgins can’t distinguish between savages and their victims. The Times’ coverage of the assassination attempt was long overdue, but the article just added insult to injury. Hedegaard is a free-speech activist who was targeted for death by Muslims who use brutal violence to impose Shariah. But you’d never know it from the New York Times article, which could easily have run in the Tehran Times.
Higgins immediately rips into Hedegaard, a man of principle and nonviolence, characterizing his opinions as “a stew of anti-Muslim bile and conspiracy-laden forecasts of a coming civil war.”
In his article, Higgins furiously spins a new narrative: that Muslims might rightly despise Hedegaard, but they actually support him. He even includes this claim in his article’s title: “Danish Opponent of Islam Is Attacked, and Muslims Defend His Right to Speak.”
“That Danish Muslims would rally to defend Mr. Hedegaard, a man they detest,” writes Higgins, “suggests a significant shift in attitudes, or at least in strategies, by a people at the center of a European debate over whether immigrants from mostly poor Muslim lands can adjust to the values of their new and, thanks to a long economic crisis, increasingly wary and often inhospitable homes.”
A shift in strategies, indeed. Higgins quotes Karen Haekkerup, Denmark’s minister of social affairs and integration, saying of the Muslim leaders: “They have changed their approach.” He also quotes Imran Shah of Copenhagen’s Islamic Society, saying this of the murder attempt on Hedegaard: “We knew that this was something people would try to blame on us.” Higgins doesn’t explore the implications of these statements about how the Muslim leaders have just changed their approach and strategy out of concern for being blamed, without changing their core beliefs. He doesn’t explain how the Islamic leaders justify discarding Islam’s blasphemy laws, or even question whether they’re really sincere in claiming to support Hedegaard’s freedom of speech.
Even worse, Higgins strongly implies that Hedegaard himself is responsible for the attempt on his life: “The response from native Danes has grown more equivocal over time, with some suggesting Mr. Hedegaard himself provoked violence with his strident views and the activities of his Danish Free Press Society, an organization that he set up in 2004 to defend free expression but that is best known for denouncing Islam.”
Higgins quotes Mikael Rothstein, a religious history scholar at the University of Copenhagen: “I think that Hedegaard wanted this conflict … brutal words can be as strong as the brutal physical act of violence.
