Remember the Danish cartoons? A 27-year-old Somali does:
Danish police on Friday shot and wounded a man trying to enter the home of an artist who drew controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
The man, a 27-year-old Somalian who was armed with an axe, was caught trying to break into the home of Kurt Westergaard at 10pm local time, police said.
Police shot the man, injuring him in his leg. . . .
Mr Westergaard’s cartoon was seen at the time as the most controversial, as it depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban.
“Controversial” but entirely vindicated by events since. To return to the theme of my post a couple of days back, a significant percentage of Muslims in the West do not understand concepts such as pluralism and freedom of expression. A further percentage understand them very well but reject them as loser fetishes incompatible with the requirements of Islamic supremacism — and have a shrewd sense that when, push comes to shove, a lot of these fine liberal concepts crumble to nothing. Is the percentage of Muslims who support Mr. Westergaard’s right to free expression and the broader principles of intellectual liberty sufficient to make the importation of legions of “27-year-old Somalians” a net benefit to Denmark?
The answer to that seems obvious. But Mr. Westergaard is 74, and I’ll bet his half-century-younger attacker grasps however crudely the demographic symbolism, in Scandinavia and beyond.