Motus Mentis

Amongst all the turmoil in the Mideast, some good news: Lars Hedegaard has been acquitted — on a technicality, but we’ll take it. He published this statement at the website of the International Free Press Society:

As my ancient forefathers, the Vikings, would have said: It is always good to fight. It is better to win.

My detractors ”“ the foes of free speech and the enablers of an Islamic ascendancy in the West ”“ will claim that I was acquitted on a technicality, namely that the judge in the Court of Frederiksberg resolved that my supposedly offensive comments on the violations against little Muslim girls were not intended for public dissemination.

That is absolutely true. The judge chose the way out provided by my capable counsel. However, the public prosecutor has been privy to the circumstances surrounding my case for a year ”“ and yet he chose to prosecute me. Obviously in the hope that he could secure a conviction given the Islamophile sentiment among our ruling classes.

My acquittal is therefore a major victory for free speech.

have no doubt that the massive support I have received from freedom fighters around the world has been instrumental in securing my acquittal.

This outcome will encourage people all over the West and beyond to speak up.

The battle for freedom is far from lost.

Courage!

Everlasting shame to the Western media who ignored this story.

Prominently featured at the IFPS page is this fine rant by Pat Condell, in which he reminds us that:

…without the right to speak your mind, all other rights are worthless. Free speech is … as intrinsic and essential a part of our identity as the Koran is for Muslims — and nobody has the right to restrict it or to modify it, regardless of who claims to be offended.

Over the transom comes a link to an analysis of the Egyptian situation by foreign-policy analyst Barry Rubin. Some salient excerpts:

There is no good policy for the United States regarding the uprising in Egypt.

…There is no organized moderate group in Egypt. Even the most important past such organization, the Kifaya movement, has already been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Since 2007 its leader has been Abdel Wahhab al-Messiri, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a virulent anti-Semite.

Muhammad el-Baradei, leader of the reformist movement, says that if he were to be president he would recognize Hamas as ruler of the Gaza Strip and end all sanctions against it.

…That is not to say that there aren’t good, moderate, pro-democratic people in Egypt but they have little power, money, or organization. Indeed, Egypt is the only Arab country where many of the reformers went over to the Islamists believing””I think quite wrongly””that they could control the Islamists and dominate them once the alliance got into power.

Nothing would make me happier than to say that the United States should give full support for reform, to cheer on the insurgents without reservation. But unfortunately that is neither the most honest analysis nor the one required by U.S. interests.

In my book, The Long War for Freedom, I expressed my strong sympathy for the liberal reformers but also the many reasons why they are unlikely to win and cannot compete very well with the Islamists.

The Brotherhood’s new leader sounds quite like al-Qaeda and has called for war on both Israel and America.

…it is also being said that the Brotherhood is not so popular in Egypt. Then why did they get 20 percent of the vote in an election when they were repressed and cheated? This was not just some protest vote because voters had the option of voting for secular reformers and very few of them did.

Having said all of this, U.S. influence on these events, already rejected by Egypt’s government, is minimal. It is morally good to speak about freedom and seem to support the protestors but also quite dangerous and will not reap the gratitude of the Egyptian masses in the future. After all, aside from the likely radicalism of their leaders, a revolutionary regime would be hostile toward the United States since America would be blamed for supporting the Egyptian dictatorship for decades. President Obama will not charm them into moderation.

The Egyptian elite wants to save itself and if they have to dump Mubarak to do so””as we saw in Tunisia””the armed forces and the rest will do so. But if the regime itself falls creating a vacuum, that is going to be a very bad outcome. If I believed that something better could emerge that would be stable and greatly benefit Egyptians, I’d be for that. Yet is that really the case?

Consider this point. Egypt’s resources and capital are limited. There aren’t enough jobs or land or wealth. How would a new regime deal with these problems and mobilize popular support? One route would be to embark on a decades-long development program to make the desert green, etc. Yet with so much competition where would the money come from? How could Egypt try to gain markets already held by China, for example?

More likely is that a government would win support through demagoguery: blame America, blame the West, blame Israel, and proclaim that Islam is the answer. That’s how it has been in the Middle East in too many places. In two cases””Lebanon and the Gaza Strip””democracy (though other factors were also involved) has produced anti-democratic Islamist regimes that endorse terrorism and are allied to Iran and Syria.

Is America ready to bet that Egypt will be different? And on what evidentiary basis would that be done?

The emphasis, then, should be put on supporting the Egyptian regime generally, whatever rhetoric is made about reforms.

Read the whole thing here.

See also here.

The pot is aboil all over the Mideast and the Maghreb; today the world’s attention is focused on Egypt, where the long reign of Hosni Mubarak seems to be coming to an end. (Mubarak’s son, his heir apparent, has apparently already fled.)

The indispensable NightWatch offers a crisp analysis of why events like these can move very quickly:

Comment: In Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria long time leaders are trying to reinvent themselves or, perhaps just stall for time so they can safeguard their wealth and families.

In Critical Decisions [actually, the book is “Crucial Decisions” – MP], Irving Janis made the point that catastrophic failure means the whole leadership group must be replaced in business and in politics. There are no second chances; no do-overs. The irony is that by the time failure is recognized, it is too late for the incumbent regime to fix it, even if it has the insight and capabilities. People always want new blood.

That creates a dilemma for incumbent leaders. They all have a set of resources for handling the normal range of challenges. They also have reserves they can draw on in the event of a crisis. However, the only way a regime’s leaders can be certain a crisis is occurring is when the normal resources prove incapable of continuing the challenges, as occurred in Tunisia. This is as true for police forces in urban America as it is for security personnel in Cairo.

Recognition that a crisis is emerging, in practice, always occurs after damage has already taken place and forces have faltered. That means that leaders are almost always in a reactive mode. The police have to be overrun before the Army can be called in.

To be proactive would be to act with what appears to be unjustified and unnecessary force because the police have not failed yet. It is a dangerous time because the damage can be so great that the reserve forces of order cannot or might choose not to restore order. In Tunisia, for example, the reserves, in the form of the Army, balked and the head of government fled. Internal uprisings can get out of control with little warning, as a result.

The final point is that the usual diplomatic mantra is that the US has relations with governments and its policies are not tied to people. And yet in every Middle Eastern state, the widespread perception is that US policy is identified with individual rulers, from the Kings of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco to the strong men in Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria and Egypt. The practice works and policy support flourishes until the leaders are overthrown.

Strongman rulers cannot all of a sudden be generous democrats.

The implosion of the senescent Mubarak dictatorship will create a power vacuum in the region’s most populous (and overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) nation. The US, seeing that Mubarak is no longer the “strong horse”, has now conspicuously withdrawn its support for him, and has made public statements asserting the “universal human rights” of the protestors now rioting in the streets, and expressing its optimism about democracy in general — despite what democracy can be expected to lead to in situations like this.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and although the newspapers have so far reported that religious groups appear not to have played much part in the uprising, anyone who has paid any attention to Egypt’s modern history will know that the principal opponent of the secular Egyptian dictatorship is, and has always been, the Muslim Brotherhood — the patient, hydra-headed global Islamist organization (its front groups include Hamas in Gaza, and CAIR in the US) that has been awaiting its chance in Egypt for decades (and which of course has never forgotten the execution of its chief political theorist, Sayyid Qutb, by Nasser in 1966).

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners — for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence — as a “moderate” Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach” to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost” mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering”) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see — in fact we should be astonished not to see — the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

“Democracy” there may be, briefly, in the wake of Mubarak’s fall; but anything resembling a secular, West-friendly democracy will be short-lived indeed, if it comes to pass at all.

In our previous post we republished the statement before his inquisitors of Lars Hedegaard, the president of the International Free Press Society, who stands trial, in a supposedly free nation of northern Europe, for the crime of uttering a forbidden opinion in his own home.

You would think that the leading newspapers of the capital and principal cities of the world’s most influential democracy — a nation that enshrines in its founding document the freedom of the press, and the right to speak one’s mind, as its cardinal individual liberty — would have a keen interest in this startling attack, in an ancient center of European culture, on the central principle of the civilization whose blessings we share, the fundamental right that guarantees all the others.

But this morning I made a search on the websites of both the Washington Post and the New York Times for the name “Lars Hedegaard”, and found nothing.

Think about that: the president of an international organization whose purpose is to protect the freedom of the press is being muzzled in a Kafkaesque show trial in a major European city, and the Times and the Post look the other way. The reason? The nature of Hedegaard’s unforgivable crime, which was to speak out in defense of his own people against an ancient and mortal foe, and for the survival of his moribund native culture in its tiny homeland.

The blogger “Fjordman” calls these dark days by a name taken from ancient Nordic myth: RagnarÁ¶k.

The show trial of Lars Hedegaard, the president of the International Free Press Society, took place today in Copenhagen. He stands accused, for remarks he made in a privately taped interview, of violating a Danish law that allows a prosecutor to bring criminal charges against anyone deemed to have spoken words that insult or degrade others on the basis of race, sexual identity, or religion. In this case, Hedegaard made frank remarks about the permissiveness in Islamic culture toward sexual predation, oppression, and punishment of girls and women.

As in the Geert Wilders trial, truth is no defense under the law. The prosecution need only establish that the defendant uttered words that a “victim” would find offensive.

Diana West summarizes the case here. Today Lars Hedegaard — the outcome of whose trial has already been decided, and will be revealed on Monday, January 31st — made a statement that I, and I hope every other blogger who cares about the extinction-by-assisted-suicide of European civilization, will reproduce in full.

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.

For example, I am not only insulted and degraded and threatened, but shaken to the core of my being when I hear a well known Danish imam state that, of course, sharia law – Muslim law – will be instituted as Denmark’s official legal regime when there are a sufficient number of Muslims. I strongly urge our country’s jurists to get acquainted with the implications of the sharia, not only for Muslims but equally for non-Muslims, who – if they are lucky – will be reduced to a life as subhuman outlaws. And if one cannot be bothered with tedious dissertations, one may take a look at the legal order pertaining in areas where the sharia holds sway either de jure or de facto. One will then encounter a legal order the like of which we have not known since the passing of the Law of Jutland in 1241 and probably not before.

But the imam wants this disorder introduced in the country where I was born. And I must admit that I am troubled. I am also troubled when said imam defends the killing of Muslims who have left Islam and when he confirms that women and men guilty of fornication must be pelt with stones until they are dead. He thinks that is God’s commandment, which he cannot ignore.

Should I go to the police and tell them how threatened, insulted and degraded I feel? I wouldn’t dream of it for I support free speech. And if free speech has any real meaning, it must also – and in particular – protect statements people do not want to hear. Regardless of how revolting such statements may be.

Besides it would be futile to report the imam and those similarly disposed to the police for the public prosecutor would never indict them. Otherwise it would have happened long ago.

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 the insulted who enjoy the tender graces of the public prosecutor, and there are the less favoured who must endure insults directed at them.

But perhaps this is to do with the notion that one must not insult minorities whereas minorities are free to insult majorities? If that is the explanation of why I am in court today, it is a peculiar one. In 2002, the imam I have already mentioned explained to his flock that all Muslims in the world – 1,6 billion or whatever the number is – constitute one people, one umma. The same thing is emphasised by the Islamic Conference Organisation, OIC, encompassing 57 member countries. In other words, the five million non-Muslim Danes are a microscopic minority but nevertheless a minority whose members stand to be punished if they make statements on cultural norms in the umma.

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.

But what will he have gained? Does the public prosecutor believe that people will start talking about Islam and Muslim culture with greater respect and reverence? Perhaps in public because people fear fines and jail. But what will people say to each other when they think that the thought police are not listening?

And what does the public prosecutor imagine people will think of a religion, a political ideology and a culture that need the protection of legislators, police, the public prosecutor and the courts because they cannot defend themselves in a free and open debate?

In 1644, when the English parliament considered the institution of religious censorship, that Christian defender of free speech John Milton wrote: “There is yet behind of what I purpos’d to lay open, the incredible losse, and detriment that this plot of licencing puts us to, more then if som enemy at sea should stop up all our hav’ns and ports, and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our richest Marchandize, Truth.”

And further:

“There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. ‘Tis their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meeknes, nor can convince, yet all must be suppresst which is not found in their Syntagma.”

Milton concluded with this exhortation:

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

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. For ten months the prosecutor has been aware of the conditions under which I spoke. That has not affected him in the slightest. I hope it will affect the judge.

Update: further remarks and comments here.