Terror Threat Against Danish Cartoon Editor Flemming Rose
PajamasXpress blogger Flemming Rose learned yesterday that he was the target of a planned terrorist attack. The editor who published the controversial Mohammed cartoons writes that he is determined not to let the revelation change his life.
Support Pajamas Media; Visit Our Advertisers
“How does it feel?”
It wasn’t the unforgettable line from Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ That’s not what the reporter had in mind. No, she wanted to know what it feels like to be a potential target of a terrorist attack.
“It hasn’t changed my life, and won’t, because that is exactly what they want. They want to intimidate and threaten,” I told her.
Yesterday one of the four defendants in a terror case in Odense, Denmark’s third largest city, revealed in court that in the summer of 2006 a fellow conspirator had suggested building a remote-controlled car bomb and driving it into my private home in order to kill me.
The reason: the publication of 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in my newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
“It was a bit of a joke, and we laughed a little, though I know that it wasn’t a laughing matter,” the defendant said.
Joke or no joke, the defendant acknowledged that in fact two men from the cell had a bit earlier detonated a bomb in a soccer field using a cell phone as the remote control. The purpose of this activity was to excercise their “craft.”
The defendant is a 34-year-old Danish-born man who converted to Islam. He has provided the police with a lot of compromising information about the other three members of the cell. The convert told the police that AK, a 22 year old man born in Iraq, travelled to his home country in 2005 to become a suicide terrorist. The young man insists that he went to shoot a documentary.
“He told me that he had shot a goodbye video in the mosque,” the convert explained in court.
On February 6, at the height of the cartoon crisis, the 22 year old AK wrote on the Al Qaeda affiliated website www.alfirdaws.org under the headline “From Denmark. Help us killing those who have blasphemed the Prophet”:
I am looking for poison that kills quickly. I’ll do it myself, and Allah is my witness.
Praising Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, he offered to sacrifise himself in the war against the infidels:
Revenge, revenge. I am the first volunteer. God is great.
The young man accused the Danish government of being allied with the Jews and denounced Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as a dog, because during the cartoon crisis he had refused to meet the ambassadors from the Muslim world who had called for the punishment of Jyllands-Posten for publishing the Mohammed cartoons.
According to the police, the cell had been radicalized by early 2005. They were downloading bomb manuals, watching videos of beheadings of hostages and discussing several possible attacks. One involved the Danish parliament, another was directed at the office of Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen and a third was aimed at an unnamed cartoonist. They had been buying fertilizers and other material used to build bombs, but they were not very professional.
A Danish expert on terror told me that is one pattern the process of radicalization follows. The first stage involves a lot of talking and watching videos and downloading material from the internet. Then the radicals start looking for possible targets, sometimes jokingly, sometimes not.
It may sound strange, but my wife didn’t understand the joke about the car bomb and our house, though I have to say that she usually has a fine sense of humor. And she made it clear that our neighbors probably wouldn’t find it very funny either. In fact, the neighbors of Ayaan Hirsi Ali forced her out of her apartment in Holland in 2006, insisting that she was a threat to their safety. Fortunately, it hasn’t come that far in our neighborhood. People are very friendly, and we haven’t heard any complaints.
The four men on trial were arrested in September 2006 in a big police operation. The trial is a test for Denmark’s new law against terrorism, and for the police methods of planting an agent inside a cell of radical Muslims. How far can a police agent go in order to play along with other members of a terror cell? It’s also the first case that involves a reading of Islam that justifies terrorist attacks by referring to the war in Iraq and the publication of the Mohammed cartoons.
| Comment |  Digg This |
 del.icio.us |
 |
 |
 PJM Home |
11 Comments
David Thomson:We must thank Flemming Rose for his heroism. This is the only way we will defeat the Islamic totalitarians.
Oct 3, 2007 - 4:41 pm Herr Morgenholz:So he was subject to a death threat in 2006? Thanks for the timely information………
Oct 3, 2007 - 6:16 pm BMoon:Indeed the cartoonists and people like Flemming Rose risk their lives for all our sake- for the defense of free speech and the preservation of liberal values in the west, against the combined onslaught by fanatical Islamists and their allies, the loonbat left who were responsible for the murder of another anti-totalitarian European, Pim Fortuyn.
Oct 3, 2007 - 10:24 pm DP111:David Thompson
I dont think this is the way we can defeat Islamic radicals.
In this case the police were lucky. In Van Gogh’s case they were not. In all such cases the damage to our society has already been done, as other authors and publishers have already been dhimmified. The West cannot survive as a concept or idea, if writers are terrified to express their views.
The only answer and way to defeat Islam is to stop the Jihad from progressing in the West. And that means to acknowledge that a totalitarian ideology such as Islam and an open society, cannot live in peace at the same time and place. Even an open society has to recognise that there are exceptions to tolerance of all.
Muslims and Islam have thus to be separated from the West. Or else we are looking at a civil war in Europe that will make WWII or Bosnia look mild by comparison.
I hate to write this, but that unfortunately, is the only humane option left if we wish to retain our open and tolerant society.
Oct 4, 2007 - 3:13 am Linda Frank:Herr Morgenholtz, did you read the article? Flemming Rose was sitting in court the other day and found out he had been the target of a terror murder attempt. Maybe that’s not news to you, but it would certainly have been to Mr. Rose. Thanks for your “contribution.”
Oct 4, 2007 - 7:44 am Lyle Smyth:David Thompson:
Exactly right. Islam is incompatible and indeed seditious to any Western republic or democracy. It is not up to us to tolerate them. They have plenty of lands that will accomodate them.
Islam is also infiltrating the U.S. but in Europe the situation is nearly critical. The Vichy Left will let them march right over you and then be the first ones running for the hills when they realize that they are the first ones to go under Sh’aria.
We hear on a regular basis about Islamists blowing up statues of the Buddha, etc. Imagine what is going to happen to Stonehenge? To the Sistine Chapel? The Louvre? In Europe you must see yourselves as safeguards to some of the great treasures of the world (and that includes your own children and grandchildren, who will be under the Islamic whip if we refuse to stand up for our liberty and throw Islam out. Now.
Oct 4, 2007 - 7:55 am 1389:Unless we distinguish our real friends from our real foes, and treat them accordingly, we will soon be facing civil wars everywhere in the world. Some of these conflicts will be fought with nuclear, perhaps even thermonuclear weapons.
Oct 4, 2007 - 3:41 pm Fai Mao:Is there anyplace I can download these cartoons? I’d put them on my blog.
Oct 5, 2007 - 12:17 am DP111:Lyle
Our governments and agencies are devoting huge amounts of money to help Muslims “integrate” in the West. All of these will come to nothing, as Islam is their faith, and these efforts will wash over them.
What we don’t seem to realise is that we do not have the right to tell Muslims in the West, how to behave, what to wear, or what is acceptable or not as regards homosexuality or women’s freedom etc. Muslims believe what they believe, as their religion tells them to, and have no real choice in the matter. That is their human right, and we should respect that. It is patronising in the extreme for us to lecture them on these matters.
However, we do have the right to tell them to take their attitudes and go where such attitudes are acceptable. In this we will be doing everyone a favour, for I fear a civil war in Europe that will make Bosnia look like a garden party. This is inevitable, as Muslims are required by the Koran to wage war (Jihad) until Islam is dominant.
In such a civil war, innocents will be slaughtered (civil wars are always like that). It is far better and humane to have a peaceful separation from Muslims - financial inducements and recompense being the way forward, for Muslims to go back to nations where their customs are acceptable.
I hate to write this, but that unfortunately, is the only humane option left if we wish to avoid a civil war, and retain our open and tolerant society.
Oct 5, 2007 - 4:08 am 1389:Fai Mao:
Here you are:
http://1389blog.com/2007/10/05/join-the-mohammed-cartoon-blogburst/
Oct 5, 2007 - 4:10 am Roger W. Gardner:Why am I not surprised to see the words ‘civil war’ coming up repeatedly in these comments? Is it because things, like this latest threat to Flemming Rose, are finally forcing us into a showdown?
I certainly hope so. I certainly hope we are not just preaching to the choir here. I certainly hope that the West has finally run out of its multicultural patience and come to its senses before it’s too late.
My God! Isn’t there something terribly wrong with a society which has reached a point where it is considered courageous to publish a cartoon or write an article about a FOREIGN religion?
Unfortunately, it has already reached this point and Mr. Rose is, indeed, courageous.
And we in the West should be ashamed of ourselves for ever allowing it get to reach this point. We should be ashamed of ourselves for meekly acquiescing to the senseless demands of the liberal PC loons.
We shake our heads and write our comments and write our letters to the editors and our world goes to hell right in front of our eyes.
We have allowed the vipers into our nest, and now people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Michelle Malkin, and Flemming Rose are paying the price for our collective passivity. They are being threatened, or forced to move, or both. All this in the name of multicultural tolerance.
If it wasn’t so deadly it would be a joke.
I am quickly becoming ashamed to be a part of this weak-kneed, lily-livered Western Civilization of ours
who are sacrificing our citizen’s freedoms for the sake of some delusional liberal utopia.
God help us.
Oct 5, 2007 - 8:09 pm