“Decent People Should Avoid Lars Hedegaard”

Our Danish correspondent TB sends his translation of an article from 180grader about the recent attacks against Lars Hedegaard. Mr. Hedegaard, as most of you will recall, is the chairman of Trykkefrihedsselskabet (the Free Press Society) as well as president of the International Free Press Society. Most readers will also recognize the name of his most prominent attacker.

TB says, “They are trying to do the same thing to Trykkefrihedsselskabet as they tried to do to GoV. Creepy.”


Lars Hedegaard and Geert Wilders

Known Islam critic denounces Lars Hedegaard: He is an extremist

The chairman of Trykkefrihedsselskabet, Lars Hedegaard, is an extremist and decent people should not mingle with him. That’s the message from one of the international world’s Islam critics, Charles Johnson, according to Weekendavisen.

After the terrorist attack on World Trade Center in September 2001, Charles Johnson started “Little Green Footballs”, the leading blog among Islam criticizers, where he used a lot of energy to reveal Muslim extremism wherever he found it. The blog quickly became a hothouse for the international Islam criticism movement and was a source of inspiration for other Islam critics.

Today, though, Charles Johnson thinks that many people from that environment, in whose creation he himself was a primary engine, have become too extreme, and actually more fascist than liberal in their criticism of totalitarian Islam, and in their proposals of how to fight it. One of the persons whom Charles Johnson places among the bad people is Lars Hedegaard. Johnson read a controversial speech which Hedegaard gave in Brussels in 2007. And he saw the English-language interview with Lars Hedegaard which was published on the Danish blog Snaphanen.dk, and then Johnson noticed that Trykkefrihedsselskabet associate themselves with the Belgian party Vlaams Belang [This is of course a lie. They only supported their right to speak out freely after they were assaulted in Brussels. — translator] which Ayaan Hirsi Ali has called a “racist, anti-Semitic, extremist party”.

Given that background, Charles Johnson’s verdict over Lars Hedegaard is clear:

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“Now that I have realized his connection to Vlaams Belang and his extreme statements I would like to put him on my list. I remember him very well. He is obviously an extremist, and to talk about ‘a public uprising’ is insane. He associates himself with fascists and calls for violence and he should be avoided by decent people,” says Charles Johnson to Weekendavisen.

TB adds this:

Just for your information, this is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali said about Trykkefrihedsselskabet:

“In a time when Western civilization is threatened from both outside and within, the Danish Trykkefrihedsselskab is an important ally in the fight to fortify and preserve the most crucial and fundamental right in a free society — freedom of speech.”

Note: the above quote from Charles Johnson has been translated from English to Danish and then back into English, so it may not be a verbatim rendering of the original.

Photo ©Snaphanen