Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Uriasposten Writes About Anti-Jihad Denmark

Below is my translation of an article posted today at Uriasposten, one of the top two blogs in Denmark (along with Snaphanen).

It’s all about the smear job done on Anders Gravers and SIAD by the newspaper Nyhedsavisen yesterday. See our earlier posts on the same topic for more information.

There are two reasons for posting it here: first, to present a view of the whole affair from an entirely Danish perspective, and secondly as an exercise in improving my Danish — and boy! was it a big job. Thanks to Phanarath for helping me correct my mistakes.

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Nyhedsavisen’s radical leftist Rune Eltard-Sørensen: “SIAD is militant”

Rune Eltard-SørensenImagine what would happen if critical journalists went over Nyhedsavisen’s Rune Eltard-Sørensen’s work thoroughly. Today he delivers an article of the sort that cries out to heaven. Here it is, at full length…

[text of the entire article follows]

Fact: the new organization called ‘Anti-Jihad Denmark’ has been founded. Within this coalition are, among others, SIAD, Frie Danske Nationalister and Frit Danmark. The chairman of Frie Danske Nationalister, Julius Børgesen was earlier convicted of unlawful possession of weapons. This chairman anounces that his group are armed at their meetings.

Postulate: ‘Anti-Jihad Danmark’ is a militant organization.

It goes without saying that a newly-formed organization cannot be militant when its mission statement indicates otherwise. Nothing in the article supports the headline, and the final quote from Frit Danmark’s chairman all but indicates the opposite. It should also come as a surprise that SIAD became a partipant in a militant network virtually overnight. In Århus SIAD could only assemble twelve or thirteen spectators for a demonstration, and according to the newspaper most of those were old-age pensioners.

SIAD has a prominent place in the story, and it says, among other things, that “they had been subject to a ban on demonstrating for fear of trouble”. Not incorrect, but the basis for prohibition has always been the circumstance that the police cannot guarantee their security during the demonstration. (example). Several months after it became a group, SIAD was attacked with bottles during a meeting in Valby. Just because the Reds and Greens failed to acknowledge the premises of democracy does not mean that SIAD became militants.

Rune Eltard-Sørensen quotes SIAD’s chairman Anders Gravers as saying “Criminal immigrants must be kept behind bars, have their citizenship removed and be sent out of the country”. Not exactly an indication that SIAD is armed… with anything but words.
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At Nyhedsavisen’s web page there is quite a lively debate about the article. Most interesting is the snip from SIAD’s website to the press…

Anders Gravers emphasized again and again in a telephone interview on May 7th that we operate lawfully… Anders Gravers did not mention a word about being armed, but explained that the anti-jihad proceeds at a verbal level and absolutely lawfully. But that was not something that was ever explained to your readers.

To bash the radical right is a discipline that journalists love, and it is not the first time headlines have been written before the research is done, but since it is known that the journalist Rune Eltard-Sørensen is a radical leftist and has physically attacked the people’s elected politicians, the newspaper cannot be said to be acting in good faith. Editor-in-Chief David Trads markets his news as independent, but a man who appoints the radical left to write about the radical right, and approves “Armed network wants to stop Islam in Denmark”, is not acting in good faith.


Hat tip: Steen.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have some friends and family who work or deal with the non-political media in the UK and I know of authors and editors who have lost jobs over things like this (mostly "minor" stuff like copyright issues, unchecked facts, etc).

Is there any chance that either Rune Eltard-Sørensen or his editor will lose their jobs over this? Why is it that different standards apply to politics? Both the left and the right are guilty of things like this, but it really just shows how untrustworthy journalists are.

Unknown said...

I think Rune Eltard-Sørensen does not deserv all this excitement - he is a nullity and obviously a fool.

Rune Eltard-Sørensen is said to be a radical left activist and a member of 'Globale Roots' (founded by diverse so called antifascists, feminists, EU-opponents etc with the abode at the former notorious "Youth-house" on Jagtvej, Nørrebro).
At the Municipal election 2001 he spouted tomato ketchup on Peter Brixtofte the then mayor of Farum. On the 18th of March 2003 he took part in the "painting attack" on Christiansborg, the Danish Parliament, where he was flinging paint at the Foreign Minister Per Stig Möller. He said he was protesting against the Danish participating in the Iraq war. This painting attack caused him four months in jail for violence against a civil servent. He nowdays seems to earn his living by trying to be a journalist at diverse publications. /condensed from Danish Wikis.

-ln
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Google has shorted my initials to a lonely l!

Anonymous said...

All I corrected was a single sentence that came out with a different meaning.

I am really impressed by the Baron.

Yorkshireminer said...

Dear Phanarath,
Aren't we all impressed, just wait a few months and he will be correcting your Grammar. People used to laugh at me when I used to say that Danish wasn't a language but a throat disease when I tried to get my throat around those extra vowels and throw in the odd glottal stop for good measure while trying to keep my mouth shut at the same time, but I didn't know that it was infectious, perhaps he could make a bit of money as a side line translating some the good Danish SF writer like Anders Bodelsen. I hope you lot didn't give him a hard time with “ Røde grød med fløde”. No, you wouldn't do that would you ?

Anonymous said...

Yorkshireminer :-)

Yes we would, but we simply forgot.

The Baron confused us by talking all the time, hehe

Baron Bodissey said...

YM, don't believe him. He and Semantes laughed themselves silly -- absolutely cracked up -- at my Danish pronunciation.

Besides, if I talked all the time, where did I learn all those good Danish jokes?

I'l never learn to speak the language properly, but I am learning to read it.

By the way -- it wasn't the ø that was so hard, it was the å (and to a lesser extent, the y) that gave me trouble. And the r is all but impossible for my American uvula to form... :)

pst314 said...

"laughed themselves silly...at my Danish pronunciation"

The late science fiction writer Poul Anderson used to have fun when Isaac Asimov would try to pronounce his name correctly. No matter how many times Isaac listened to Poul and tried to repeat what he said, he never got it quite right. Perhaps it was the Brooklyn accent. He was not just a fine writer but a great guy. I miss him.

Unknown said...

I just wanna go on record saying this;

I was silly before I laughed at The Barons pronounciations, and so was Phanarath.

Heck, a lot of us are still trying to learn our own languages to perfection, unattainable (sp), but Baron has impressed me with his quick grasp of the basics and then some.

On a sidenote, on a scavengerhunt amongst secondhand books last week I found a very nicely preserved paperback copy of Poul Andersons "Three hearts and three Lions", in English, it is sitting at Phans place awaiting shipment to the Baron.

All we need to know is, should we marr it with a few scribbled words or send it over pure ? ;o)

Have about 7000 assorted SciFi and Fantasy titles scanned to word format if any of you others a avid readers btw.

As for the main topic, the man is not a journalist, but then I am a purist when it comes to words and their implied meanins, ethics afs.

Derail on......

Chris Bering said...

Yes Baron, Danish is a strange language indeed.
I'm very impressed by your translations - but also a bit mystified as to why you're learning Danish. I mean, Danes has no illusions about the usefulness (or rather, lack of) of the Danish language.
Unlike Swedish, Danish hasn't been updated for ages. When new things and words to describe them are invented, we simply take those, typically English words, and use them without modification.

As a consequence, many, mostly technically oriented companies and places of higher education are very "internationally" oriented when it comes to language, and some even makes English their internal, official or preferred language.

Anyway, Baron, if you really want to impress, try translating these perfectly valid Danish sentences:

Ringeren i Ringe ringer ringere end ringeren ringer i Ringsted.

Får får får ? Nej, får får ikke får. Får får lam.

Baron Bodissey said...

Chris,

There are several reasons for my learning Danish. Denmark is far ahead of other Western countries in waging the Counterjihad. So Denmark is important, and I want to learn to understand it a little on its own terms.

Secondly, I went to Denmark recently, and it's only polite to learn a little of the language when you visit another country.

Thirdly, there are so many Danish readers and commenters here who have learned English -- I want to return the courtesy.

Finally, it's fun. English etymology is my passion, and Danish is so closely related to Old English that it's like an etymological lesson in action! It's fun just to look at the words and figure them out, based on their Common Germanic roots.

As for your tongue-twisters -- I'm guessing, but I'd say:

The rings in Ringe ring less than the rings ring in Ringsted.

Do sheep make sheep? No, sheep don't make sheep. Sheep make lamb.

Chris Bering said...

Bravo!
I accept the second translation, but doesn't sheep have lambs rather than make lamb ?

A little help with the first one:
"Ringeren i Ringe ringer ringere end ringeren ringer i Ringsted."

This one is about the guy from Ringe who tolls the church bells in a worse way than his college from Ringsted does it.

There's not a single "ring" (as in the kind you wear) in the story.

What appears to be the same word has 5 different meanings and 4 of them are used in this sentence.
Hehe, looking at it again, you didn't have a chance.

Chris Bering said...

I used wiki on "old english", and find it amazing that a couple of centuries of "Norse" influence could have such an impact.
How many vikings were in England to cause this ?

Baron Bodissey said...

Chris,

All those different "ring" definitions are in my dictionary, but I lack the cultural context to know which ones are which in the tongue-twister.

As for Old English (now that you've gotten me started) --

Old English and Old Norse were almost the same language, basically dialects of a common tongue, arising out of the Low German/Jutland complex of western Germanic. When the Danes conquered England and ruled the Danelaw, many Old Norse words were so similar to the Old English versions that they supplanted their Old English counterparts in the common dialect, especially in the north and east.

Other words were quite different from the English versions, but were adopted anyway, sometimes replacing the Old English, sometimes in parallel.

For example, the English slang or dialect word for mouth is "gob", which is obviously derived from the same root as the Danish word "gab", and people who engage in small talk are "gabbing". These words didn't replace the English words, they supplemented them.

There are any number of distinct Danish-derived words in English which are synonyms of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

But some words were so similar that they were hardly distinct. The earthen dike protecting a village or farm was a burgh in Old English and a byr in Old Norse (modern Danish "by"), with only a slight difference in pronunciation.

OK, the etymology lecture is over for today. But now you see why learning Danish is fun for me.

Baron Bodissey said...

P.S.

Chris, the Center for Vigilant Freedom wants to contact you. If you are willing, please email me at unspiek@chromatism.net.