Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.
The BBC reported his demise thus:
Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision
He was not, in fact, a cartoonist. He was an artist, primarily a sculptor - of limited technical skills (as he conceded) but of whimsical imagination. Yet, as the gates clank shut on free speech across Europe, it's easier for lazy Beeb hacks to lump every dissenter under the category of "Muhammad cartoonist". In 2006 a Swedish joke went viral, as nobody said back then: someone placed a model of a dog on a roundabout, and then someone else put another dog at another roundabout, and for a while the rondellhund was a genuine grassroots phenomenon. I appreciate that Americans don't find roundabouts funny in the least, so the joke in the "roundabout dog" craze might get a little lost in translation.
At any rate, the jest came juddering to a halt when Lars drew Mohammed as a roundabout dog in three works for an exhibition at an art gallery in Tällerud. The gallery got cold feet, but one of the drawings was published in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, as part of an editorial on free speech. Just as Jyllands Posten forbore to republish the Mohammed cartoons on their tenth anniversary, so Nerikes Allehanda would not republish Lars' drawing today. All those "robust debates on freedom of expression" have been indefinitely postponed and very non-robustly. For the record, here is the picture that changed Lars Vilks' life:
It was an unusual traffic accident. On a divided carriageway with a sturdily fenced median, the police vehicle somehow managed to cross into the oncoming lane to find itself just in front of a large truck. As Robert Spencer puts it:
The names of his police guards need to be released. As does the name of the truck driver. Note that 'the rescue service and the police said it would take a lot for a vehicle to be able to pass into the other lane, given that it is separated by a wire fence.'
The Swedish police continue to investigate. Whatever the circumstances of the fatal crash, Douglas Murray is correct as to the broader cause of death:
Lars Vilks was a man, and an artist, of enormous courage. He should never have been in this situation, and if other artists and others across Europe had not been such cowards then he never would have been.
I ponder the grim arithmetic of that 2010 event. Six of us on stage that day: One firebombed, one forced into hiding and out of his job, one shot, and now one dead. It's like Agatha Christie for jihadists: And Then There Were None. Maybe someone would like to produce a film or a play on the theme. Ah, but no: As Douglas says quite correctly, Lars Vilks was only in that van because of the miserable cowardice of our so-called artists, a "community" that spends the whole year giving each other awards back and forth for their "courage" and "heroism".
The principal change this last decade is that the western left has junked that apocryphal bit of Voltaire and cheerily put itself on the same continuum as Islam's enforcers: They're not (yet) firebombing your kitchen but, like the fellows who do, they agree that apostasy (misgendering et al) must be punished, severely.
And so a truly heroic man - on the great central question before Sweden and Europe - dies alone and in hiding.
Rest in peace, Larish.
https://www.steynonline.com/11733/a-hero-and-a-hoot
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