Rotten judgment in the state of Denmark

Feb. 8, 2006 | Kashmir this week declared a nationwide protest against 12 cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed published four months ago in a provincial Danish paper. Iran officially launched a cartoon war against the West, calling for competitive lampooning of the Holocaust. I can't wait to see what comes next. Will we reach a state of de facto deterrence based upon the stockpiling of sketches? Are roundtable negotiations of mutual editorial disarmament to follow?

I would much prefer cartoon wars to fatwas calling for beheadings. But in the process of this big cartoon upheaval that has spread across Europe and beyond, my country of birth, Denmark, has fallen from grace. The modern myth of "the little tolerant people," rooted in a group of Danes who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi deportation in 1943, has died.

In the past five years, I have interviewed 300 Muslim leaders in Western Europe about their views and solutions for the integration of Islam. It has long been evident to me that religious toleration and reverence for human rights have been sorely lacking in Denmark. The debate now raging over the caricatures has tilted on the defense of free speech -- but a deep and unflinching commitment to free speech is not really the mission of the paper at the center of the maelstrom, nor of the present Danish government.

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the 12 caricatures, has a circulation of about 175,000 and is Denmark's largest paper. The paper's main offices are in Aarhus, the country's second-largest city, on the outskirts of town in an area zoned for industrial use. The building resembles a well-kept small manufacturing plant, but inside everything is white and pleasant. It is where I grew up, and in my family the paper still sits on our coffee tables. But don't let the blond wood deceive you. Jyllands-Posten is a conservative paper and it has always minded the religious and political sensitivities of its readership, the Lutheran farmers and the provincial middle class.

In Denmark the national papers have historically been associated with the main political parties and the movements that formed them. Jyllands-Posten is associated with the prime minister's party. In English, Fogh Rasmussen's party is referred to as the Liberal Party; in Danish it is "Venstre," meaning "the Left." But the party is neither left nor liberal. The names date back to the days of limited suffrage, when the Conservatives were "the Right" and there were only those two parties. My father, a brother and a sister ran for office from Rasmussen's party. It was the party everyone else in my family voted for. Once I emigrated to the U.S., family unity on political matters was restored.

The Economist called the Danish cartoons a "schoolboy prank." That describes them pretty well, but I like a few of them nonetheless. One is of a benign-looking Prophet, who stands on a cloud turning away a line of suicide bombers with, "Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins." That one elicited a laugh or two in my family. My favorite one, though -- which was aimed at the cartoon publishers, not Islam -- shows Mohammed as a seventh-grader, who has written on the blackboard "Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs." Two others portray the Prophet much the way Jesus is usually drawn, but darker and with a halo that has turned into horns. The rest are a predictable mix of self-righteous, unfunny commentary and depictions of shady-looking faces with big, bulbous noses and blood-dripping swords. They tab popular prejudices about Muslims as war-mongering and misogynistic blackbeards. They are the pebble that started a tsunami -- but they were never meant to be innocent.

The cartoons started out as a gag, the kind you do when the news is slow. Flemming Rose, the paper's culture editor, decided last summer that he was fed up with what he described as the spreading "self-censorship" on matters related to Islam, so he solicited cartoonists for drawings of "how they saw the Prophet." On Sept. 30, 12 cartoons were published under the headline "Mohammed's Face." Rose cited a statement by a Danish stand-up comedian, who had complained that he was afraid to make fun of Mohammed on TV. A children's book author complained that he could not get anyone to illustrate his book about Mohammed. Another example of Islamic pieties' crushing influence on free speech was that three theaters had put on shows deriding George Bush, but none Osama bin Laden. Cartoons are an important anti-totalitarian expression, Rose wrote, and therefore the paper had asked 40 Danish cartoonists to draw their image of Mohammed. Only 12 responded. Rose implied that some of those who did not respond were infected by self-censorship.

This all would have been very well if the paper had a long tradition of standing up for fearless artistic expression. But it so happens that three years ago, Jyllands-Posten refused to publish cartoons portraying Jesus, on the grounds that they would offend readers. According to a report in the Guardian, which was provided with a letter from the cartoonist, Christoffer Zieler, the editor explained back then, "I don't think Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them." When confronted with the old rejection letter, the editor, Jens Kaiser, said, "It is ridiculous to bring this forward now. It has nothing to do with the Mohammed cartoons." But why does it not? Can you offend Muslim readers but not Christian readers? "In the Muhammed drawings case, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for these cartoons," Kaiser said. "That's the difference."

And therein lies the truth. The paper wanted to instigate trouble, just not the kind of trouble it got. And in this mission it acted in concert with the Danish government. "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid," boasted the minister of cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, in a speech at his party's annual meeting the week before Rose's cartoon editorial last fall. Mikkelsen is a 39-year-old political science graduate known for his hankering for the "culture war." He continued, "The Culture War has now been raging for some years. And I think we can conclude that the first round has been won." The next front, he said, is the war against the acceptance of Muslims norms and ways of thought. The Danish cultural heritage is a source of strength in an age of globalization and immigration. Cultural restoration, he argued, is the best antidote.

Next page: Behind the cartoon upheaval: Extremist exploitation -- and some painful political truths