Witch-hunt and heresy in Denmark

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about the witch-hunt in Denmark against Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society and The International Free Press Society. Along with a Danish MP, Jesper Langballe, Hedegaard has been prosecuted for ‘racism’ after he drew attention to ‘honour’ violence among Muslim families. He is now on trial, and this is the speech he made to the court in Frederiksberg two days ago. Here’s a flavour:

My counsel has instructed me that in cases brought under Article 266b, the only thing that determines whether one is convicted or not is a matter of the perceived insult whereas one is barred from proving the truth of the statement. The article deals with public statements whereby a group of people are ‘threatened, insulted or degraded’. But as my lawyer has already noted, I have made no public statement.

When it comes to Article 266b, there is no equality before the law. I am daily insulted and degraded by something I read or hear and I am sure that most people have the same experience... As jurisprudence shows, not only in Denmark but in all European countries with similar insult articles in their penal code, these insult articles open the gates to inequality before the law. There are insulted who enjoy the tender graces of the public prosecutor, and there are the less favoured who must endure insults directed at them.

...What does the public prosecutor hope to accomplish by my conviction? He may drag me in front of a court. He may portray me as a racist, a right-wing extremist and a non-human. He may do the same to hundreds and thousands of others who insist on their right of free speech to describe Islam and Muslim culture just like we would deal with any other phenomenon in a free society.

...In conclusion permit me to mention the true victims in this case. The public prosecutor has not considered the 20,000 women in the Muslim world who every year fall victim to so-called honour killings, or the 50,000 Muslim girls in Germany who the federal police consider threatened with genital mutilation, nor the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Muslim majority societies who have been sold into marriage with much older men and who must therefore live a life of constant rape, while Islamic scholars preach that this is in complete accordance with religious orthodoxy.

I hope that the judge as opposed to the public prosecutor will consider the fate of these unfortunate human beings. Likewise I hope that the judge will realise the absurdity of prosecuting me for statements made within the confines of my own four walls.

As Mark Steyn notes in a fine and savage piece about this obscenity in Denmark:

His is merely the latest in a long line of the western world’s new heresy trials --Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, Geert Wilders and Gregorius Nekschot in the Netherlands, Michel Houllebecq in France, Michael Smith in Australia, Ezra Levant and me in Canada.

As in Canada, as in the Netherlands, so in Denmark the defendants in such cases are informed that the truth is no defense. ...That’s why these are heresy trials, and only the first of many. The prosecutors think Hedegaard, Langballe, Wilders, Mrs Sabbaditsch-Wolff et al are apostates from the new state religion of multiculturalism. Thuggish Muslim lobby groups, on the other hand, consider them heretics against Islam. In practice, it makes little difference, and multiculturalism is merely an interim phase, a once useful cover for an Islamic imperialism so confident it now barely needs one. The good news is that European prosecutors are doing such a grand job with their pilot program of show trials you’ll hardly notice the difference when sharia is formally instituted. ...

This trial shames Denmark. If Lars Hedegaard is convicted, another light in Europe will have been extinguished, and the remainder will follow, very fast. In their folly, the multiculti enforcers are setting the stage for great violence, and a descent into barbarism.

Read Hedegaard’s speech, and weep for Europe.