I woke up this morning to find this comment by a Dane posted on last night’s news feed:

I thought you may want to know; not sure where to post this, so here it is anyway: This morning, Steen from “Snaphanen” in Copenhagen, Denmark was picked up by six police officers and taken in for questioning in handcuffs, and his computers, hard drives etc. seized. Allegedly for linking to links from other links to links eventually leading to a video of a beheading. Shakespeare was right. There IS something rotten in the state of Denmark.

I took a quick look at Steen’s Steen’s blog. He has posted — using a borrowed computer — about what happened. He’s not the only one who was rounded up this morning; evidently this was a big day for cracking down on “Islamophobes” in Denmark.

In Denmark! I thought Denmark was different, but evidently not.

This is the closest to home the repression has hit. Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was prosecuted and convicted, but she was never arrested, nor did she have her computers seized. This is the first time a good friend of mine has been handcuffed and taken away to help police with their enquiries.

I spent many enjoyable hours in Steen’s company on several occasions a few years ago. He put me up in his apartment and introduced me to a number of Danish dissidents, including Lars Hedegaard. Steen is a superb photographer — that was his primary pursuit before he took up Islamophobia. He took the photo at the top of this post in happier days, when I was in Denmark back in 2009, enjoying a meal at a restaurant with a group of Scandinavian dissidents. You can see me sitting at the far end of the table.

Below the jump is a machine translation of Steen’s post, adjusted to the extent that I could manage it. The mention of “Joseph K.” is a reference to Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial: