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“I don’t want to talk about it,” says the bearded man when he opens. A child’s voice is heard from inside the apartment.
We are in the well-worn Koppargården district of Landskrona, on a winter’s day in 2016. The bearded man at the door tried a few years earlier, along with his little brother, to kill the artist Lars Vilks.
One afternoon in late May 2010 he drove the brothers in the Scanian camp to the boarding house that Lars Vilks rented at the time. They carried Coca-Cola bottles with them that they filled with gasoline, with holes in the plastic cork to make it easy to spray.
The al-Qaeda terror group had given a reward after Vilks hired the Prophet Muhammad as a watchdog: $ 100,000 for anyone who kills the Swedish artist, with a $ 50,000 bonus if he is “slaughtered like a lamb”: they cut off his throat.
The brothers had knives. They smashed the kitchen window, doused gasoline and set it on fire. Perhaps the plan was for Vilks to run off when the house was on fire and for the brothers to cut his throat. But everything went wrong for the Landskrona brothers.
Lars Vilks was not at home, even though his car was parked in the yard. And of course the artist’s curtains and a kitchen cupboard started to burn, but so did the brothers’ clothes. They put their jackets on fire and fled.
Police found the synthetic jackets half melted on the grass. In the pockets: summons to the National Dental Service, driver’s license and gymnastics license. The brothers were arrested, prosecuted and convicted for attempted arson.
“I hate him. He is an enemy of God, he is an enemy of the prophet, he is an enemy of Muslims,” said one of the brothers about Vilks in the district court, who sentenced him to three years in prison.
When I knock on your door in Landskrona he has served his sentence, but the craze for radical Islamism remains. I have seen his Facebook page where he shares texts from terrorist leaders and where he, after 130 people died in the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, wrote:
“No one can turn a blind eye to what France is doing, violence will always lead to violence.”
Before closing the door, his brother says that he is no longer a threat to Vilks: “He must live his life.” Maybe it is true. But others are queuing to kill the artist.
2011 three men armed with knives were arrested terrorist sympathizers in Gothenburg, just before they approached Lars Vilks. In 2015, Islamic State terrorist Omar El-Hussein attacked the Lars Vilk Committee’s seminar on freedom of expression in Copenhagen with an automatic weapon. The Swedish bodyguards returned fire and took Vilks to safety. They saved the life of their protégé, but two other people were killed.
I have written a lot about Lars Vilks in DN. Some people may find it annoying. But I experience that the stubborn artist and his tragic fate are often hidden.
When i was working on the book “The shootings in Copenhagen” I followed Vilks for a year and saw closely the mechanisms of expulsion of the Swedish public. Vilks was sometimes invited to exhibitions and panel discussions, but the invitation was often withdrawn.
Which was seen as radioactive. His revelation was a constant reminder of terror and death. I saw people with panic in their eyes switch tables when Vilks arrived at a restaurant with his bodyguards. For some, he was a political suspect. Where was he really standing? Artist colleagues and gallery owners expressed their sympathy, to announce in the next breath that it would be best if the artist stayed away from the current event.
Lars Vilks, 74, is still persona non grata. Recently, I was hoping to participate in a group show, but nothing turned out. “Another non-exhibition,” Vilks writes on his blog and quotes an email from the organizer: “all other artists withdrew or have doubts.”
Yes, I know him. Being forced to live as a prisoner in his own country, in a secret place, constantly guarded, without even being able to know his girlfriend properly. But I do not write because I feel sorry for Vilks, but because his situation is a reminder of the great problems we have with radical Islamism in our society.
Lars Vilks in a secret location with one of the drawings he made for an exhibition in 2007. Since the drawing was published in Nerikes Allehanda the same year, he has lived with death threats from various terrorist groups.
Photo: Niklas Orrenius
The same anti-human ideology that wants to see Vilks killed is a threat to all of us. Although the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is minimal, we know that it may be enough to be at Drottninggatan in Stockholm on a normal Friday afternoon, or at a Christmas market in Berlin, or, like Thursday morning, in a church in Nice. where a terrorist yelled that God is great on the same crank while killing three people.
Some groups are particularly vulnerable. Shiite Muslims, for example. The only terrorist attack in Sweden that ISIS officially took on and boasted about was aimed at a Shiite prayer hall in Malmö.
Jews are also targets of radical Islamists. To protect their lives, Swedish Jews are forced to convert synagogues, preschools and meeting rooms into forts fortified with security locks, surveillance cameras and guards. It is an embarrassing Swedish reality and, like Vilk’s fate, a reminder of the power that radical Islamism has won in Sweden.
French teacher Samuel Paty He was on his way home from work last Friday when 18-year-old Abdullah Anzorov stabbed him to death with a long knife. Anzorov cut off the master’s head and shouted “Allahu akbar”. Samuel Paty had aroused the ire of Islamists with his teaching on freedom of expression, which included cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. This is how Swedish teachers work, says Läraren magazine.
One of the strangest things about Paty’s murder is that there seem to be a lot of people involved. Among the seven suspects are two students who singled out the teacher before the murder, as well as a father who is suspected of starting an online campaign against Paty, his daughter’s teacher.
Even in Sweden, there are groups of radical Islamists fighting for democracy. In the preliminary investigation against the Landskrona brothers a friend of theirs appears, a young man whom I call Amjad. Investigators suspected that Amjad might be involved in the Vilks attack, but were unable to link him to the crime scene.
On Amjad’s Facebook page I’ve seen IS propaganda, Jewish hatred, and statements like “democracy sucks.” An informed source has said that Amjad belongs to a circle of young Muslims in Scania who follow “ignorant and very extremist preachers.”
Amjad has moved in circles where many traveled to jihadist groups in Syria. Around 300 young men and women from Sweden joined ISIS and other terrorist groups. It places Sweden second on the top list, after Belgium, of the EU countries where ISIS has managed to recruit the most terrorists per capita. In 2017, Säpo estimated that there are just over 2,000 violent Islamist extremists living in Sweden.
At a time of heightened anti-Muslim incitement, some opinion leaders and politicians may feel eager to lift the threat of radical Islam, fearing it will fuel hatred against an already vulnerable minority.
I think the opposite is true. If you don’t shed light and fight against radical Islam, it will be easier for Muslim haters to mislead people that Muslims are generally dangerous and foreign. Sweden, like France, is a society with large minorities. Muslims make up a large and important part of the Swedish population – 8.1 percent, according to estimates by the Pews Measurement Institute. They must be allowed to live their lives without being suspected.
When the Swedish ambassador to France was interviewed on Sunday on the SVT agenda, he calmly said: “France is a Muslim country.” While speaking out strongly against violent Islamism, the ambassador noted that Muslims have an obvious place in French society.
He showed that the dividing line is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between democrats and anti-democrats.
