What the Danish and European media misunderstand (and misrepresent) about America, and vice versa. And other stuff.
Rasmus Paludan is back in the international spotlight. I’ll just cite the lede from Danmarks Radio (DR): Rasmus Paludan burned a Koran in Stockholm on Saturday. Now Turkey will not support Swedish membership in NATO. Danmark’s Foreign Minister called that both shaming and shameful—the buring of the Koran, obviously, not a sovereign nation responding to…
An editorial in today’s Berlingske, signed by Pierre Collignon, is unusually sensible. Entitled “The west hasn’t lost yet. Let’s wait a little before selling out,” the editorial takes exception to the “realists” and “pragmatists” suggesting that the western powers—the US, the EU, NATO—should promise Russia that Ukraine will never be granted membership in the EU…
Apart from a few articles about the Biden-Putin video conference the other day, most of them pretty matter-of-fact recitations of the White House and Kremlin versions of the conversation, Danish media has been very light on American political news lately. I’ll cut the Danish media some slack on this: there’s enough going on closer to…
Joe Biden is tottering around Europe with the poise, grace, and dignity of an angry old drunk muttering obscenities while bouncing off a slot machine at a seedy casino . There’ve been all the usual gaffes and awkwardnesses we’ve come to expect from our somnambulant president: calling the RAF the RFA, asking to introduce heads…
The big story today is DR’s revelation that Denmark’s foreign intelligence service (the FE, analogous to America’s CIA) cooperated with America’s NSA to monitor the digital communications of Germany’s top leadership: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her Foreign Minister, and the opposition leader, among other political leaders from northern European nations. The big DR story is…
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Denmark was covered widely in the Danish press. TV2 had a liveblog. So did Berlingske. So did Jyllands-Posten. So did B.T. Politiken doesn’t appear to have run a liveblog, but they squeezed a headline out of a commonplace: “Blinken: It’s a true pleasure to be in Denmark.”…
The U.S. ambassador to Denmark during the second term of the Obama Administration was a wildly popular fellow named Rufus Gifford. Gifford began his career in show biz, where he worked as an assistant producer on several films and appeared as Dog Owner #1 in Garfield: the Movie. Having thus conquered Hollywood, he made the…
