Think again. Pennsylvania resident Colleen LaRose, a 46-year-old high school dropout who called herself “Jihad Jane” when she was surfing jihadi websites, pleaded guilty in 2011 to being part of a plot to kill Lars Vilks, the same Swedish cartoonist whose support group was targeted in Copenhagen on Saturday.
LaRose traveled to Europe and also followed Vilks online “in an effort to complete her task,” according to federal prosecutors. In 2007, Vilks had drawn a cartoon of Mohammed with the body of a dog.
According to the indictment against her, LaRose emailed the Swedish embassy in Washington asking for instructions about how to become a permanent resident of Sweden.
LaRose also sent emails to another American citizen, former Colorado resident Jamie Paulin Ramirez, during the summer of 2009 inviting her to Europe and asking her to attend a “training camp.”
Ramirez traveled to Ireland in September 2009 with “the intent to live and train with the jihadists,” according to prosecutors.
Ramirez pled guilty in 2011 on charges of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization and was sentenced to eight years in prison. LaRose was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison.
Over the past four years three American citizens have been convicted in plots to murder Scandinavian cartoonists and journalists who they believed had insulted Islam. And two other Americans have also been convicted of inciting violent attacks against cartoonists in the States who they felt had insulted the Prophet Mohammed.
Plot aimed at Danish newspaper
Chicagoan David Headley, who played a critical planning role in the attacks in Mumbai, India, in late November 2008 by the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 166 people, also hatched a plan to attack the leading Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had published cartoons in 2005 of the Prophet Mohammed that were deemed to be offensive by many Muslims.
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Chesser was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His co-conspirator, Jesse Morton, was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for conspiring to solicit murder.
In the sentencing memorandum that he submitted for the sentencing of Morton, MacBride also explained, “As philosopher Karl Popper wrote in ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies,’ ‘If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.’ ”
This is precisely correct. A core tenet of the modern era, which was sparked by the Enlightenment of the 18th century — much of which took place among the Parisian intellectuals who were the forebears of the fearless cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo — was well expressed by a quote often attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The killers in Paris and Copenhagen reversed this key formula of the modern world: I disapprove of what you say and I will kill you for it.
No one has heard anything from the Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris since she went into hiding more than four years ago. For Norris that must have been a very difficult decision, but the attacks in Copenhagen and in Paris reinforce the notion that it was likely a sensible choice.
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