On the Wow! front, rumor beats fact as usual

I thought I wouldn’t get back to the Jutland business but I am weak, hence curiousity’s easiest prey. What do I know about the man who authorized the Mohammed cartoons?

— Flemming Rose interviewed Daniel Pipes last year. While I am skeptical of the Pipes family, there is little I can infer from this fact. Interviews is what journalists are supposed to do.

— Rose spent three years in the US as a Washington, DC correspondent.

— Rose was Jyllands-Posten’s correspondent in Moscow from 1999 to 2005, and another paper’s Moscow man in 1990–1996. I have read some of the interviews he did — he’s not big on provocation at all. (One of those was with Edward Limonov, the writer and the National Bolshevik, with whom Rose had a calm and meaningful conversation.) I have not seen Rose’s coverage of the Chechen wars but I did not discern the familiar anti-colonialist hysteria in the questions he asked on the subject.

The facts end here. Now some rumors from the Russian segment of the net.

— They say Rose was born in the USSR but that’s most likely a hoax. I haven’t found a good bio of the man but his being an immigrant would have given his opponents a few trump cards.

— Rumor two is that Flemming Rose the Russian correspondent was as viscerally anti-Russian as Glucksmann, Redgrave and the crowd.

— Rumor three is the opposite: Flemming Rose the Russian correspondent married a KGB general’s daughter and is probably a KGB officer! (That is, Putin is responsible for the post-cartoon mess.) This seems to come from a Chechen source, which also accuses Rose of not supporting Akhmed Zakayev’s bid for asylum in Denmark.

I wish Flemming Rose, the internationalized man of mystery, would come out of his self-inflicted semi-retirement, to tell us more about himself.

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