The scene after today’s shooting at a Copenhagen cafe that left one dead. (REUTERS/Liselotte Sabroe/Scanpix Denmark)
ROUND AFTER ROUND was fired today into a Copenhagen cafe, and the deadly burst rang with echoes of Paris. In the hail of bullets, some heard a familiar sound: freedom of expression again coming under attack.
One person was killed, and three police officers were reportedly injured, as a gunman fired into the Danish cafe, which was hosting a public event on free speech.
The gathering featured Lars Vilks, the provocative Swedish conceptual artist who in his illustrations has depicted Muhammad as a dog and Christ as a pedophile. Helle Merete Brix, an event organizer, thinks Vilks was the escaped gunman’s intended target, according to the New York Times.
Vilks, 68, published his Muhammad artwork after the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy, and has been a repeated target since 2007, appearing on death lists of radical Muslim groups. Vilks, who receives round-the-clock police security, has been attacked in his home and at a university lecture, and was the target of a murder plot by a Pennsylvania woman known as “Jihad Jane.”
Also unharmed at Saturday’s event — titled “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” — was François Zimeray, the French ambassador to Denmark.
Still alive in the room
— Frankrigs ambassadør (@francedk) February 14, 2015Last month, five prominent cartoonists were among those killed in a massacre at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which had reprinted the Danish Muhammad cartoons and satirized the Islamic prophet.
“Once again, we are reminded there’s a very brutal war going on right under our noses,” Robert T. Russell, executive director of Cartoonists Rights Network International, tells The Post’s Comic Riffs. “Many of the same questions will be raised that we all discussed after the Charlie Hebdo killings.
“Once again, we’ll most likely come to the same conclusions: Freedom of speech and the freedom to express one’s self without fear of retribution continues to be the best pathway to a more tolerant world,” continues Russell, whose Virginia-based organization is running a crowd-funding campaign to defend “the creative and human rights of cartoonists under threat throughout the world.”
“My heart,” Russell says, “goes out to the person killed in this attack, and the family that will now try to cope with actions of people who only understand hate.”
