According to this approach, the public sphere is not for dialogue, but an area for serious battling and confrontation. Free speech and freedom of expression, which we all support, became a weapon of the power holders in this battle, in which both the Danish government and Jyllands-Posten refused to engage in dialogue with concerned Muslim citizens and organisations. Anders Fogh Rasmussen span his way out of severe criticism in a friendly interview in Jyllands-Posten on 30 October , arguing that if a non-Western representative criticises freedom of speech, it is simply because he — as a non-Westerner — does not understand the notion.
This helped the government and newspaper to shape social memory in such a way that the issue was remembered as a free speech issue and not the outcome of increased Islamophobia. He prides himself on travelling widely and finding the same issue everywhere, but his lack of listening skills and empathy prevents him from seeing anything beyond himself. Once we dig deeper than an inch, we need to separate the act of publishing twelve cartoons, from stories about the publication.
Egyptians, Indonesians and Pakistanis are not hypocrites for protesting without having seen the actual publication. The stories about the publication travelled and told the story of a hegemonic Western world that once again did not respect Muslims, while denying dialogue with them. When news about the cartoons travelled, it was decontextualised from its original setting and recontextualised into a different locality, where the reactions of some foreign governments, local conditions of power and security played their part.
In fact the lack of civil society mechanisms, inferior legislative protection, socio-economic marginality, draconian security surveillance and exposure to feared aggressive militant Islamists and terrorists are conditions many Muslims endure. The stories of the cartoons and the denial of respect and dialogue yield the experience of inferiority and, once again, of being bossed around. Today, the bomb-in-the-turban cartoon has for many Muslims become such a hated object that it is comparable to the swastika.
Insisting again and again on publishing such a loaded cartoon reveals a man who is blinded by his own predatory narcissism. Rose presents himself in the book as the heroic global fighter against the Soviet Union, Nazism and communism, and places Islam in the same group of -isms. But he forgets to tell that he is a neo-conservative, like the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as you can see from the fact that most of his sources are neo-conservative hate-mongers or simply radical and extreme-right figures.
Rose was a left-winger himself at first, but then as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, he got mugged by Soviet reality. His publisher, the Cato Institute, is financed partly by the US neo-conservative billionaire Koch brothers. Neo-conservativism is the new powerful -ism that Rose forgets to tell us is behind the fight against Islam and communism.
This is such a simple fact that it seems ridiculous that reviewers of Rose still miss it. At the end of the day, we are left with no clear idea of what Rose wishes to accomplish. Does he want to get rid of legislation on racism and blasphemy? For me, these images and the cartoons that come with the Draw-Muhammad-Day activism provide an image of the kind of inferno we risk ending up with, through people with the right to publish but no empathic or social skills.
The footage gave a glimpse of how far Rose wants to take his ideology. Flemming Rose: I am a great admirer of Ayaan, whose courage and eloquence are an inspiration for all advocates of freedom and equality.
In the context of Europe, I guess that we agree that Europe needs to get rid of hate speech laws and blasphemy laws. The best way to fight hateful opinions is not through bans but through an open and free exchange of ideas.
As a citizen, I would like to know who holds those opinions instead of pushing them underground. What does most of your work involve there now and what do you want to work on in the future? Flemming Rose: I have been working on digital platforms and free speech. On top of that, I have been working on a short book on free speech in the context of diversity, identity, and culture.
Flemming Rose: I am against criminalizing hate speech. Also, there is no clear-cut definition of hate speech. This means that hate speech laws quite often are used to criminalize unpopular speech and opinions. Hate speech laws are very popular among autocrats and they use them to silence dissent and people challenging their power. Also, the definition of hate speech reflects the social and cultural norms of the dominating elites in society, which means that they, in a multicultural and diverse society, tend to impose their norms on minorities.
Why should we fight the urge to self-censor when speaking about taboo topics? Flemming Rose: I think there is an important distinction to be drawn between self-censorship and good manners or etiquette.
I try to be polite when I interact with other people, and when I dine at a restaurant I use my knife and fork instead of my fingers. Self-censorship is different. It means that I would like to say something but I refrain from doing so because I am afraid of saying it because of what might happen to me, my family, and my friends. If we prefer a free society, then we have to overcome our fears. I find it important that we welcome dissent, that we create an atmosphere in which we welcome people to air their opinions in spite of the fact that they might be unpopular and controversial.
Self-censorship is difficult to identify because it is invisible. People need to be honest about their motives for self-censoring in order for society to know that it is going on. So, in order to fight self-censorship, we need to be honest about it. Self-censorship is driven by a fear of various consequences—physical, social, professional, and many other repercussions. We need courage, we need to make up our mind whether we would like to live in a free or fearful society.
The right to free speech is restricted through legislation- the criminalization of hate speech, blasphemy, glorification of terrorism, and other kinds of so-called insults.
I think there is an important distinction to be drawn between self-censorship and good manners or etiquette. Self censorship is a tough one, I find myself self censoring at times. I do it out of convenience, not out of fear.
I have a love for history and my knowledge base of events is often deeper than many people I speak with. I often find myself wanting to say something but then realizing that if I say that thing it will likely be perceived in a certain way which will then require a more lengthy and in depth conversation. I do not self censor out of fear but rather an attitude similar to do not cast pearls before swine. To his defenders, he is a brave and unflinching advocate of Enlightenment values.
To his jihadist persecutors, he is a blaspheming infidel fit for slaughter. Rose, as well as being a father, husband, and grandfather, is a journalist and editor—or at least he was until earlier this year, on January 1 to be precise, when he vacated his position as the foreign-affairs editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I met up with him over two days in December in Copenhagen, where I interviewed him shortly before his departure from the paper and around the tenth anniversary of the affair that had brought him international renown: the publication of a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
We had first met two months earlier at a free-speech conference at Wellesley College in Boston, and Rose was keen to return to the themes that had dominated our discussions there: the relationship between words and deeds, the role of ridicule and humor in free societies, the centrality of free speech to democratic life, trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the infantilization of American students.
One of the things that I was worried about was the relationship between Dolph Lundgren and his firearm. With all that bulk, just how fast a draw would he be? Words and images, he concedes, can be hurtful. But they are not agents of mass destruction. They were also blasphemous in the eyes of many Muslims. The government responded by insisting that it had no right to interfere with the freedom of the press.
This was still largely a Danish story, right up until the end of January , at which point it began metastasizing into a global flashpoint—and people started getting killed. On February 4, , the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria were set alight. A day later, a mob burned down the Danish embassy in Lebanon.
In total, people were killed amid demonstrations against the cartoons from Nigeria to Pakistan. Later still, in January , a Somali man wielding an axe and a knife made a failed attempt on the life of Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn the picture of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban; the assailant was unable to penetrate the panic room where Westergaard had sought refuge along with his five-year-old granddaughter.
Devoid of context, it certainly looks this way, but then devoid of context violence can pretty much look like anything you want it to look like.
This was on February 3, The very next day, protesters torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria.
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