Islam critic Hedegaard sues Swedish newspapers for libel

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if you are concerned about the crime, talk about the crime. this thread was created for the sole purpose of discussing how supposedly biased the swedish media is in their reporting of the incident, and his subsequent lawsuit. whether or not he is some celebrity is not relevant to me. he said some incredibly hateful things which would make people pretty angry. this was not an isolated incident. he lost his job over a similar racist bent. of course, nobody deserves to be killed over an idea like that.

but we were not discussing that - we were discussing his lawsuit.

Yes, they do. It's part of their deontological code. Of course that many news in the USA and EU are politicaly biased, but there's still a code of conduct. Just like doctors have one. Journalists are the 4th pilar in a democracy. Lets not trivialise their obligations.

his own publication is biased, so.... why would the one in sweden be any different?

I went to read the wikipedia article on him. I thought he was an "opinion maker" instead of a journalist. Still, the fact that he is partial doesn't mean that all journalists can be partial. It's like saying that if one guy kills, others can kill too. But yes, in his job he has the duty of being impartial and in his personal life ha can be as partial as he wants. My main point remains, which is, the journals in Sweden shouldn't be calling him enemy of islam. I think islamists consider him more of an enemy than the other way around. The proof is that people tried to murder him, but not the other way around.

Most of the western world engages in reaction formation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_formation) regarding islam. Very interesting indeed.

I think it's the fact that they lied about his conviction (he was acquitted, which they omitted) that's the real sticking point. The article texts are unbelievably biased (and read like the spittle-flecked comments of a raging bearded Islamist), but that's beside the point.

Quick other point about his 'conviction': under that particular Danish law, and one that I think it's enormously sinister and one that Danish people should be looking to get rid of on two counts:

a) Religion should never be above criticism or especially plain old abuse legally. If it is, we've lost it as a society. We're back into the bad old days of blasphemy. The OIC have been pushing for a worldwide blasphemy law (I can't think they're pushing it on account of the feelings of Jews) for some time now.

b) Muslims aren't a race of people. Islam is not a race - it's a religion (I'd call it other things, but I'm sticking to the facts). I can't believe the sheer outrageous dishonesty of the cultural relativists who still persist with this lie, but it's true. (Not that I believe that people should be able to say literally anything they like without censure - mainly social - about religious groups, by the way.) If Muslims are a race of people, then we should start prosecuting Muslim clerics for vile hate sermons against 'kaffirs', Christians, gays and others. In fact, we should generally be looking a lot more closely at hate speeches across the board. Strangely, the cultural relativists never seem very keen on doing that. They go strangely silent whenever that is brought up. They also go silent when Muslims are found to have beaten white people up in the street and tell them to get out of 'their' area, or harass and intimidate people on the streets of East London (an article I read on the British weblog 'The Commentator', penned anonymously by a British former Muslim decried the silence shown by the relativist left), or who run an Islamist fiefdom right in the heart of the capital (Tower Hamlets), but would scream the house down if it was the other way round if, say, the government were openly working and playing down the influence of the BNP in councils, seeing it as just another indictment of a racist society.

c) Personally, I consider 266b to be an backward and undemocratic piece of law. It makes it “against the law to ridicule a lawfully-existing religious community, punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to four months and truth is no defence to such a charge. You can be prosecuted and jailed for telling the truth. You can say things that are perfectly true, and everyone knows that are perfectly true (even amongst many people in the religious community concerned), but if elements of that community think themselves to be 'insulted' by the truth, you can be sent to prison for it. I'm sorry, but such a piece of legislation is indefensible in a free society. It's just another blasphemy law and should be removed from the books. In Denmark, both a classical liberal party (the New Alliance) and a national conservative one (the Danish People's Party) support removing this from the criminal code.

As for his acquittal; what was most shameful is that he actually was not acquitted on the substantive charge itself ("ridiculing Muslims"), but because the court found that he wasn't intending his comments to become widely publicised.

the overturn on appeal was included in both the translation he quoted and in the translation i posted. not sure what you're reading.