Ever hear of Clarence Darrow? You have if you’ve ever heard of the “Monkey Trial” of 1925 in Tennessee, which pitted him against William Jennings Bryan.

But I’m not referring to that here. For that matter, ever hear of Robert Servatius or Dieter Wechtenbruch? History now has an additional name to add to the ranks of these gentlemen, namely Geir Lippestad.

Kim jest Geir Lippestad? “Who is Geir Lippestad?” we see in the Polska headline. Well, before he took on Bryan, Clarence Darrow was famous for accepting legal clients that no one else would touch, such as a pair of teenagers (Leopold and Loeb) accused in 1924 of a sensational murder; Servatius and Wechtenbruch were the defense lawyers for Adolph Eichmann, the key Nazi in the Holocaust who was brought to trial – and executed – in Israel in 1962. For his part, Geir Lippestad has taken up the defence of (alleged) Norwegian mass-killer Anders Breivik at his current trial. (And if you click through, that is him as the second head from the left in the photo up top. Please don’t mistake him with Breivik, the most-rightward figure.)

To be clear, then, these are all admirable characters. Yes, including Lippestad – even though that Oslo legal proceeding has mainly been about Breivik defiantly confirming his guilt and, in effect, mocking the Norwegian state for lacking the death penalty within its arsenal of criminal penalties. Because someone had to function as legal counsel for Eichmann, etc. and similarly someone needs to be there doing the same for Breivik, as odious as he may be. Because that is the mark of a society with the rule of law, that practices true justice, namely that the defendant is offered the maximum opportunity to put forward his side of the story, just to be sure that society’s sanctions (fines, imprisonment, execution in certain other states) are not applied by some horrible mistake to what is actually an innocent man. (As usual with this blog, “his,” “man” and the like are intended to be generic and apply to both genders.)

Further, it is not as if Lippestad is merely some court-appointed lawyer who happened to be in the wrong place in line at the wrong time when the judge had to designate someone to work with Breivik. No, he took the case voluntarily. Or rather (to give credit to where it is really due), his wife had him take the case. That’s even in the first part of the Polish tweet, that his wife persuaded him to step forth, “because democracy demands it.”

Now, this is Norway – pretty decent folk – but that still has not stopped Lippestad having to take up police protection because of all the various threats to his life that he has received for the services he is providing to Breivik. One would expect that all of that is just an ugly patch, and that he will be able to resume his former life with no penalty once his client is dispatched to the harshest sentence that Norwegian jurisprudence is allowed to impose – I suppose life imprisonment. (After all, there has been no attempt by him to deny or even mitigate his guilt in setting off that tremendous car-bomb in Oslo last July, and then shooting down all those young people afterwards on that island.) Still, Polska writer David Charter* does provide a useful service by taking the spotlight off the accused for a little bit to consider other players caught in their own poignant situations by the awfulness of this crime.

* A curiously non-Polish name! Is this piece actually taken (and translated) from some other publication? I find no indication that it is.

Michael Schlieben, of the esteemed German commentary-newspaper Die Zeit, can’t take it anymore: Stop the Breivik Soap Opera!

Mass-murderer as Superstar: Many in the German media are exploiting the private life of the Oslo-gunman – and thereby making him an icon.

To tell the truth, I’m also getting rather tired of hearing about this guy as well – speaking of course in the context of my own media circles, which include the German only to the extent of my daily trawl through all European media.

I actually wasn’t aware of the lengths to which some outlets there have gone in pursuit of this story. Yes, there’s been some questionable stuff from the Bild Zeitung – oooh, if you click there today you get to see the actual explosion-site of his Oslo car-bomb, with hole-in-concrete and debris all around! And Schlieben says that from the Bild readers have also been able to learn of Breivik’s acne when younger, his continual troubles finding a girlfriend, and even the herpes of his step-father(!). A surfeit of information there, we can all agree – but then that’s the Bild, which for decades has carried on News of the World-type reporting for the German reading public.

No, more disturbing is other papers getting into the act which one would think would know better. This blog and Twitter-feed often invokes Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, but that publication has seen fit to reproduce all the photos off of Breivik’s Facebook profile. And we all know Der Spiegel, which has displayed on its pages photographs of the mass-murderer in an array of uniforms. Other publications (unnamed) have gone into his tax returns, or plumbed his musical tastes, perhaps from his on-line playlists.

Now, it’s not like this guy should be ignored, and over in the US an interesting debate has touched off about the alleged affinity between his “manifesto” and the extreme views of some evangelicals. Still, the sort of mass-voyeurism that Schlieben describes is all that a mass-killer with an ideological agenda could ever want. Yes: “the terrorist has won.”

Some reactions from the Danish press to the Oslo bombing/Utøya massacre:

• Here’s your connection between the two episodes: As Jyllands-Posten reports, the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who barely escaped injury in the capital, was scheduled today to be on Utøya to address the young people there at what was after all a summer camp run by the Labor Party, of which Stoltenberg is the head. (That article also has at the top a brief video giving a helicopter-view of the island itself – and of some swimmers desperately trying to get away from it.)
  
• Another Danish mainstream paper, Berlingske, wields the obvious parallel: A Norwegian Timothy McVeigh. It quotes a few experts who maintain that the likelihood for violent incidents of this kind should have been apparent from extreme-right literature, imagining future race-wars and the like, that has been circulating in Scandinavia for a while. And it examines the alleged shooter’s social media trail and unearths his self-description as a conservative Christian fed up with the Norwegian Church’s hyper-modernism, wanting it to get “back to basics.” Right, back to Jesus and his disciples, presumably – a notorious gang of killers . . .
  
• As for a Christian Danish paper, namely the Kristeligt Dagblad . . . well, they get it wrong. Very wrong. Their on-line article Here is why Norway became a target for terror, datelined today (Saturday, 23 June 2011), goes on and on about why Norway is logically a target for Muslim extremists, even as the caption to the picture up top mentions the arrest of “a 32-year-old strongly nationalistic man.” It’s hardly the only media outlet to fall into this trap – frankly, I was hearing a lot about “Muslim terror” on the BBC World Service during its initial coverage – but that’s no excuse. Don’t be surprised if the article is gone, or at least heavily modified, should you decide to click through to see it.
  

Finally, back on a somewhat lighter note, Prince was actually supposed to play Oslo today and tomorrow, in concerts that had long been sold out, reports Berlingske. Obviously, those can’t go ahead just now, but these performances are merely postponed, not canceled, and also not by much: just two weeks to 2 & 3 August. The Purple One might well be advised to avoid Controversy and bring along no Chaos & Disorder.

Don’t look now, but the controversy of the Danish Mohammed cartoons has sprung back to life. This time it’s in Norway, where last week the newspaper Aftenposten decided to republish the twelve controversial drawings – not out of any idle curiosity as to what would happen next, but as a sort of tribute to the Dane Kurt Westergaard, one of the cartoonists originally involved and the lightning-rod for the entire group who you might remember was the subject of an attempted assault on his home back on New Year’s Day. (This is reported by Jens Ehlers in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten – Has Norway gotten its own Mohammed-crisis? – which, appropriately enough, was the one to originally publish the cartoons, and which still pays Westergaard for his work.)

Of course, no curiosity is needed as to what happened next: the Pakistani Foreign Ministry condemned the newspaper’s action, and demonstrators materialized in the Pakistani city Lahore, burning Norwegian flags. But this time, according to Ehlers, they numbered only a “two-figured number of persons,” i.e. in the tens. The editor-in-chief of the Norwegian paper, Hilde Haugsgjerd, was not particularly upset at seeing her country’s colors go up in smoke (then again, I think few Norwegians would be, just because they are laid-back): “They should have their freedom-of-expression in the same way that we have our freedom-of-expression. That doesn’t change anything in our judgment.”

Nor should it. Frankly, the cartoons should really published anew on a regular schedule, not just in reaction to some new event. Yes, they are supposedly insulting to some aspect of Islam, but by this point they could be a key symbol of Western-style freedom-of-expression, one of our fundamental freedoms, which holds that anything and everything should be allowed to be ridiculed, and if anyone doesn’t like that, then that’s just too bad. Remember that the reason the Jyllands-Posten editor decided to commission and print them in the first place back in late 2005 was his fear that implicit threats of violence were leading to de facto self-censorship of any writings or drawings concerning Islam, in effect a creeping, furtive denial of that freedom-of-expression. It’s to fight that sort of craven self-denial, by means of clear, repeated examples of refusing to be intimidated, that I feel these cartoons should be republished on a regular basis.

(And is there no aesthetic consciousness out there in the Muslim world – somewhere? anywhere? – that would interpret a rendering of Mohammed’s head fused with traditional Islamic half-moon-and-star iconography as a clever piece of art, as even a tribute and compliment to the Prophet and those who follow his teachings?)