A couple of quick programming notes: North of the border, I'll be joining Toronto's Number One morning man John Oakley round about 8.30am Eastern. South of the border, I'll be checking in with Dennis Miller, coast to coast at 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific. It's ELO bumper-music Wednesday. Love those Louis Clark string flourishes.
~Last year, I wrote in our Happy Warrior department:
My friend Lars Hedegaard is a dapper, courtly publisher and editor just turned 70. Like many Scandinavians, he speaks very evenly modulated English, but, insofar as I can tell, his Danish is no more excitable. A cultured, civilized fellow, he was for most of his life a man of the left, as are the majority of his compatriots, alas. But, as an historian and a chap who takes the long view, he concluded that Islam posed a profound challenge to Scandinavian liberalism. And so at a stroke he was transformed into a "right-winger."
The other day in Copenhagen, he answered his doorbell and found a man in his early twenties who appeared to be "a typical Muslim immigrant" pointing a gun at him. He fired from a yard away, and, amazingly, missed. The bullet whistled past Lars's ear, and the septuagenarian scholar then slugged his assailant. The man fired again, but the gun jammed, and, after some further tussling, the would-be assassin escaped. He has yet to be found.
Last week, he was. Ingrid Carlqvist reports:
The Copenhagen police were tight-lipped at Sunday's press conference when they announced that they had succeeded in catching the man believed responsible for the attempt on the life of Dispatch International editor Lars Hedegaard on February 5, 2013. The man, known as the "postman", was arrested in Istanbul on Friday, April 25 and incarcerated in a Turkish high-security prison awaiting extradition to Denmark...
Among the few details revealed by the Danish police is that the suspect is 26 and a Danish citizen of Lebanese – which probably means Palestinian – extraction. At the time of his arrest, he was in possession of a fake passport. It has also come to light that he left Denmark on the very day the assassination attempt took place and that he has since been traveling between Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.
On April 28 the Copenhagen daily Politiken reported that the "postman" – so-called because he was dressed up in a Danish postal jacket when trying to shoot Lars Hedegaard in front of his home – has connections to Islamist extremists in both Denmark and Sweden. That may explain why the police have conducted nine searches at locations in Denmark and two abroad. Politiken believes that they have taken place in Sweden and Turkey.
So many of these guys are buffoons, and so it's easy to jeer. As I wrote last year:
While I was in Copenhagen paying a visit to Lars's Danish Free Press Society, a young Chechen jihadist opposed to all this outrageous Islamophobia prematurely detonated while assembling his bomb in his hotel room, and we all had a good laugh. But sometimes, as on Lars's doorstep, the jihad wannabe is less incompetent and gets a little closer.
And when they identify someone they believe is a serious public threat to Islam's stealth supremacism - as Lars is - they can be very efficiently organized.
~At the other end of the spectrum, where expensively accoutred grandees and their entourages swank around in the bubble of transnational delusion, John Kerry did something extraordinary:
In remarks before the Trilateral Commission a few days after PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity deal with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, Kerry said that if Israel doesn't cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it will either cease to be a Jewish state or it will become "an apartheid state..."
Kerry's "Apartheid" remarks are a watershed event. They represent the first time a sitting US Secretary of State has publically endorsed an anti-Semitic caricature of Jews and the Jewish state.
Charles Krauthammer says Kerry should resign:
This is an injury to an ally that will echo, because it will be repeated.
People will say, 'I'm not saying this, it is the Secretary of State of the United States.'
This was a revealing glimpse into the ugly soul of a contemptible little man. There are plenty of "apartheid" states in the region, where one's ethnic or confessional identity determines the rights one has. There are plenty of states that discriminate against "Palestinians" specifically - to whit, most of the Arab world. When I was on the Iraq/Jordanian border a few weeks after the fall of Saddam, the only people in the UN refugee camp were Palestinians the Jordanians didn't want to let into their country. As I said in my book The Face Of The Tiger and on many other occasions, it's easier for a Palestinian to move to Toronto and become a subject of Queen Elizabeth than to move to Riyadh and become a subject of King Abdullah.
Or, as appears to be the case with Lars Hedegaard's would-be assassin, to move to Copenhagen and become a subject of Queen Margrethe.
How sad that the superpower is now so disconnected from the realities of the world that its senior panjandrum, sitting atop the most lavishly funded foreign-policy apparatus on the planet, can do no more than spout the witless cliches of poseur sophomores.