Convicted of Exposing Islam?

The following article about the travesty of “justice” inflicted upon my Danish friend Steen was written by Peder Jensen, better known as Fjordman.

Earlier this month Steen was convicted in a Danish court and given a four-month prison sentence (suspended) for writing about and linking to a video of the murder of two young Scandinavian women by mujahideen in Morocco in 2018. He simply described what happened and linked to a site that had posted the murderers’ video of the atrocity, and that was enough to bring down the wrath of the Danish legal system upon himself.

Before I get to Fjordman’s account of what happened, I’d just like to say a few words about my association with Steen. I got to know him online in early 2007, and stayed with him at his flat in Copenhagen later that year when I attended the first of a series of Counterjihad conferences in Europe. He and I became good friends, and he is one of the finest people I know. (As it happens, that event in Copenhagen was the first time that Fjordman and Steen met, but that’s another story.)

Back then Steen, Fjordman, and I all wrote pseudonymously. Nowadays all three of us are public — how times have changed!

Steen took over the small blog Dansk-Svensk in 2004 and turned it into Snaphanen, retaining the combined focus on Danish and Swedish affairs. He was neither a blogger nor a writer by trade, but a professional photographer. Nevertheless, by patient work as an editor and collator, he made Snaphanen into the largest blog in Denmark.

In July of 2011, after the massacre committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, like so many of us Steen was exposed to the glare of the media klieg lights by his site’s association with Fjordman. Under the same circumstances, numerous other Counterjihad activists fled and hid in the shadows in the face of all the vicious publicity, shutting down their sites and retiring from activism.

But not Steen. He remained defiant. He kept Snaphanen open and active, saying to those who would bring him down, in effect: “Here I am. Come and get me.”

Seven years later the Powers That Be at last managed to find a way to get him. The case against him is ludicrous. It’s buffoonery. The Danish government ought to be ashamed of itself.

Somebody should market lapel buttons featuring the slogan (in Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and English): “We are all Steen now!”

Many thanks to LN for translating this Danish-language article from Snaphanen:

Convicted of exposing Islam?

by Fjordman
February 24, 2022

Maren Ueland and Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen met a beastly death in the Atlas Mountains. Back home in Denmark and Norway the media and authorities did not want people to know about it.

For many years the Danish writer and photographer Steen Raaschou has run the website Snaphanen.dk. On September 20 2022 he was sentenced by the District Court of Copenhagen to four months’ imprisonment, suspended, for writing in December of 2018 about the murders of Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland in Morocco, and for linking to a video that showed the atrocities.

The trial has taken several years. Early on the morning of May 8 2019, Raaschou had his private residence searched by at least five police officers. They confiscated his computer equipment and handcuffed him as if he had been a dangerous terrorist. Raaschou was by then a pensioner and had no criminal record.

However, the authorities wanted a harsher punishment. The prosecutor had asked for six months of unconditional imprisonment for Raaschou. But the judges decided to impose a suspended sentence, partly because of the defendant’s age and health. Steen Raaschou has been seriously ill with cancer and is still taking numerous medications on a daily basis.

I know Mr. Raaschou personally, and was present in court myself, as one of dozens of witnesses. As a non-lawyer, I immediately found the application of the law to be strange.

Raaschou was convicted by the Copenhagen District Court of violating ¶264d of the Danish Criminal Code, which prohibits the dissemination of images relating to the “private affairs” of another person and which are clearly not in the public interest.

An example of this practice is if you were to distribute or publish nude pictures of your ex-girlfriend or spouse. Such actions are intended to personally harass and humiliate another person with images that are clearly private and certainly not in the public interest.

People die every day. Some die more brutally than others. Death by murder places an extra strain on the survivors, on the family and friends of the victims. This is because serious crime is not just a private matter. The right to privacy must be balanced against the public’s right to be informed about what is happening in the world around them. People should be made aware of problems and potential threats. They have a right to demand to receive basic information about the society in which they live. Moreover, withholding truthful information may often encourage the spread of rumours, which can be both true and false.

The double murder of Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland bore the stamp of an act of terrorism. The militant Muslims who committed the murders in an extremely brutal and ritualistic manner sympathised with terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State (IS).

A deadly terrorist attack against a Danish and a Norwegian citizen is of obvious and general interest to citizens of Denmark, Norway and other countries. It is quite unreasonable to treat this in the same way as the dissemination of private nude photographs.

Steen Raaschou referred to this fact on his website Snaphanen.dk in December of 2018 because he felt that the mainstream media were not reporting the whole truth about what had really happened in Morocco. The media in Denmark and Norway wrote diffusely that the two women had received “injuries to their necks”. This is such a gross paraphrase of what actually happened that it is in fact a complete lie. Raaschou himself says that he wrote to inform the public of the truth. In no way was this done to cause inconvenience to the victims’ families.

The judges at the Copenhagen District Court rejected the arguments by Raaschou and his lawyer that he had used his freedom of speech to inform the public. They considered that the victims’ interests outweighed the defendant’s freedom of expression.

It was also argued that Raaschou could have reported the double murder in a different way, rather than by showing a diffused screenshot and providing a video link to another website.

The video footage of the murders was not shown to the parties in court. However, a witness who has worked for the police was called. He described parts of the video. The judges prohibited reporting the content of the video.

Everyone present in the courtroom, including members of the audience such as myself, were thus prohibited from describing what we heard mentioned in the courtroom about the video. Violation of this prohibition could, in the worst case, lead to our own prosecution.

The judges thus consider that Steen Raaschou should not have disclosed either the content of the video with a screenshot or a link to the video, nor mentioned it in writing. One gets the impression that the Copenhagen District Court does not really want the public to know what bestial crimes Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland had been subjected to. On his website Snaphanen, Steen Raaschou had posted a diffuse screenshot of the video and an external link for those who wanted to see the video of the murders in Morocco. It was therefore not possible to watch the video directly on Snaphanen.dk. It was linked to another website, which in turn linked to yet another website with the video itself. Raaschou also warned his own readers that the video on the external site was “extremely unpleasant”.

In 2020, media outlets across the Western world showed images and videos of the death of the black American George Floyd. This contributed to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in many cities, triggering sometimes very violent protests and riots.

The Copenhagen District Court has sentenced Steen Raaschou to four months’ suspended prison for being demonstrably more restrictive in his use of video footage of the murder in Morocco than major media outlets around the world were with video footage of George Floyd’s death. Western media have no problem showing images of dead people when they find it politically and ideologically expedient, not even dead children. This was done, for example, during the great migration wave of 2015 with the little boy Alan Kurdi.

It is interesting that Scandinavian media were not infrequently more restrictive in their coverage of the murders of Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland in 2018 than they were in their coverage of the murder of Kim Wall in 2017.

The media in Denmark also wrote about the case in some detail, including that the body was dismembered. Wall’s murder in a submarine was committed by a lone psychologically deviant person. It had no clear political, ideological or religious dimension. Peter Madsen murdered her because he is a classic example of a violent psychopath. The motive was psychopathy, not ideology.

It was undoubtedly a great burden for the survivors after Kim Wall’s death. Wall’s boyfriend has described how appalling he found the media coverage of the case. The editor Casper Walbum Høst at Danish DR says that the media cannot automatically have the same perspective on a case that close relatives have. Yes, you have to take into account certain ethical considerations, but you also have an obligation to inform the public about what happened, including the evil behind the acts.

This is exactly the same argument that was behind Steen Raaschou’s publications on his website Snaphanen in 2018. The difference is that in his case it was about Islam.

The double murder in Morocco’s mountainous region was carried out by a group of Muslims with clear religious and ideological motives and well-known jihadist methods. One would think that the media would dig more deeply into murders committed with an ideological motivation, with the intention of revealing the ideology behind the atrocities. This is clearly not the case, at least not if Islam is behind the motive. In that case, the media do not want to reveal too many details or even talk much about the thinking behind the acts.

Former Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his then-colleague Erna Solberg from Norway served up empty platitudes after the killings in Morocco in 2018. They suggested that the killings were senseless violence that had no connection to Islam. This is not true.

Brutality has been practiced and beheadings have been carried out by jihadist groups for 1400 years, with the same religious justification and using similar methods. The potential for violence within Islam is very great. Lying about this not only helps to hide why Jespersen and Ueland were murdered. It may also have contributed directly to why they were chosen to be murdered.

Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland may have been naïve. If they had not gone to Morocco, they would probably be alive today. In their defence, it should be noted that they were also, in part, victims of liars. Throughout their lives they had been deceived. Their own politicians, media and so-called experts have been claiming for decades that the Islamic culture is very peaceful, tolerant and enriching. Jespersen and Ueland are dead because they believed these lies. If they had been told the truth about Islam, they would never have visited a Muslim country as European women travelling unaccompanied.

Officially, Steen Raaschou has been convicted of violating the murdered women’s right to privacy. He is therefore also ordered to pay symbolic damages to Jespersen’s parents. However, it is not difficult to think of other criminal cases in which the well-established media to have, without any penalty, been extremely reckless in providing irrelevant details about the victims or their families.

One has reason to suspect that Raaschou will actually be convicted as well as condemned for exposing Islam’s great potential for violence.

Indirectly, he also exposes the lies of our own power elites and the dangers they expose their own populations to by importing Islam into our countries.

10 thoughts on “Convicted of Exposing Islam?

  1. “I got to know him online in early 2007, and stayed with him at his flat in Copenhagen later that year when I attended the first of a series of Counterjihad conferences in Europe.”
    ~~~~~~~~~~
    – If I remember correctly —–
    a copywritten photo of an ice cream wrapper
    played a certain role?
    – Or was it wrapper + uneaten ice?

  2. “The double murder of Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland bore the stamp of an act of terrorism. The militant Muslims who committed the murders in an extremely brutal and ritualistic manner sympathised with terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State (IS).“
    However, I visited Morocco in the late 70s along with many other young English people: all girls travelled with a male partner, even then we were conscious that islam is barbaric. I made one mistake, that was to go swimming in a swimming pool outside a small town in the Atlas. Someone said there was a pool and 3 of us went, 2 girls and one guy. I love swimming so put on my bikini and jumped in first. I was lucky to escape, put it that way. All three of us ran. Unfortunately the media keeps telling people that really, muzzies are peaceful, we didn’t have that then.

    • Having been to Morrocco numerous times, I noticed a sudden chill in the air for westerners around the first Gulf War, and we never went anywhere without a pistol and 4 mags after dark, because that is when then the islamist thought it would be a great time to kill folks like us, well they thought wrong on numerous occasions, thank God our commands at the time turned a very blind eye to it because we would never get away with it nowadays, even though in the private sector, we have better weapons.

  3. Those 2 feminaxi’s brutally raped and beheaded in Morrocco had a life time of feminaxi stupidity put into their heads and they thought and truly believed they could go anywhere a man can and do anything they wanted without any repercussions, they thought wrong and lost their heads because of it. Where there any lessons learned by this? Of course not, because islam is just like any religion and is peaceful so why worry.

  4. If natives of Denmark (and Norway for that matter) are prohibited from telling the truth about the murders of Louisa Vesterager-Jespersen and Maren Ueland, in the name of preserving Islamic sensibilities or the like, then clear-thinking Danes ought to ask themselves whether their nation has already fallen to the Saracens and their enablers.

    “If you want to know who rules over you, find out whom you are not allowed to criticize…”
    – attributed to Voltaire, but perhaps apcryphal

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