"The Left Now Seems To Have Reverence for Fanatics"

DENNIS PRAGER: Are you in Copenhagen as we speak?

LARS HEDEGAARD: I can't really tell you where I am at the moment.

DP: Can you tell me what country?

LH: I'm in Europe somewhere.

DP: The reason you can't tell is that there was an attempt to murder you just a few weeks ago. A man came to your door, speaking perfect Danish. Tell us what happened.

LH: There was a buzz on my door phone, and a man said he had a package for me, in accent-free Danish. He was, I'm certain, an immigrant from some Arab country or possibly Pakistan. I went down to get the package, and as soon as I opened the front door he pulled out a gun and shot at my head. He missed, and there was a struggle between us. I tried to hit him in the face which made him lose the gun. He then recovered it and tried to cock it for a second shot, and he didn't manage to do that. And we fought some more, and then he grabbed the gun and ran off. That's what happened.

DP: You were nearly murdered. What did you write and what are you fighting for?

LH: I don't know exactly what motivated the attack. I've been writing on Islam, Islamic history and Islamic ideology for about ten years. I haven't done anything differently recently except that we started our new newspaper, the weekly Dispatch International, on the third of January. It's a Swedish language newspaper, but we have an online edition in English.

I've been wondering, of course, why someone wanted to shoot me, and I cannot think of anything that I've done differently recently than what I have been doing these last couple of years. I've been called a hate speaker, and I'm not a hate speaker. I've been called a racist, and I'm not a racist. I'm just a normal historian and a journalist. It's my job to describe what's going on in the world, and that's what I've been trying to do to the best of my abilities.

DP: Correct me if I'm wrong: You are a man of the left.

LH: Yes.

DP: Where are the attacks on you being racist coming from? What part of the ideological spectrum?