Mark Steyn on the Lars Hedegaard trial

The last time I used the headline “Lars Man Standing” was for a National Review post about Lars Hedegaard’s analysis of Europe’s Islamo-leftist alliance. Mr Hedegaard was my host in Copenhagen back in September, when the Danish Free Press Society presented me with its Sappho Award. Yesterday, I returned from a few weeks off the Internet-beaten track to find that he is yet again the Lars man standing – standing in the dock in Fredericksburg, charged with offending Islam. 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. As Lars said in court yesterday:

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.

The Danish Member of Parliament Jesper Langballe commented on the Hedegaard case and was himself charged with “racism”. While preparing his defense, he was also told by the court that “defendants in cases brought under Article 266b are denied the right to prove their case”.

Oh.

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.

snip

And in the final indignity they'd wound up sharing a stage with me because their leftie pals weren't there for them. All your liberal friends who went to the Amnesty and PEN fundraisers and bored the pants off you with that bit of apocryphal Voltaire - “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” - stayed utterly silent. As Molly Norris discovered in Seattle. C’mon, nobody’s asking you to defend anyone to the death. A mildly principled fax would do.

That is why the Lars Hedegaard trial matters. The zombie husks who lead the western world in twilight pass off their groveling prostration as a defense of “multicultural tolerance”. It's not. It’s the Pansy Left (in Orwell’s phrase) auditioning to be Islam’s lead prison bitch (that’s mine, not Orwell’s). In the same way that the left embarked on its long march through the institutions, so too has Islam. Its Gramscian subversion of transnational bodies, international finance, human rights institutions, the academy and the justice system is well advanced.