The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  THE

  TYRANNY

  OF

  SILENCE

  HOW ONE

  CARTOON IGNITED

  A GLOBAL DEBATE

  ON THE FUTURE

  OF FREE SPEECH

  THE

  TYRANNY

  OF

  SILENCE

  FLEMMING ROSE

  Copyright © 2014 by Cato Institute.

  © 2010 Jyllands-Postens Forlag, JP/Politikens Forlagshus A/S

  Translation © 2011 Martin Aitken

  International Rights Management: Susanna Lea Associates

  All rights reserved. For information about reprint permissions, please contact Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20001.

  Published by Cato Institute Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rose, Flemming, 1958-

  The tyranny of silence / Flemming Rose.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-939709-42-4 (hardback : alk. paper)

  1. Freedom of speech. 2. Muhammad, Prophet, -632—Caricatures and cartoons. 3. Caricatures and cartoons—Political aspects—Denmark. 4. Morgenavisen jyllands-posten. I. Title.

  JC591.R67 2014

  323.44’3—dc23

  2014032590

  ISBN: 978-1-939709-42-4

  eISBN 978-1-939709-43-1

  Cover design by Jon Meyers.

  www.cato.org

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  1. FROM WHERE I STAND

  2. MASS MURDER AND SATIRE

  3. FROM MOSCOW TO MUHAMMAD

  4. THE INFAMOUS ABILITY OF HUMANS TO ADAPT

  5. THE PATHWAY TO GOD

  6. AFTERSHOCK I

  7. AFTERSHOCK II

  8. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

  9. QUESTIONING THE HARASSERS

  10. A VICTIMLESS CRIME

  NOTES

  Foreword

  As a longtime proponent of free speech, however controversial, and as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I am delighted the Cato Institute Press is publishing The Tyranny of Silence by Flemming Rose. As features editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Rose commissioned and published satirical cartoons about Muslims, some of them of Muhammad, that led to violent demonstrations in some Muslim countries as well as vehement protests elsewhere in the world, along with death threats and at least 200 actual corpses.

  In this vivid book, Flemming Rose tells why he was responsible for publishing these cartoons as well as the long-term threatening impact they have had on him. The Tyranny of Silence documents the continuous multidimensional war elsewhere on free speech. I hope that among other effects, The Tyranny of Silence will lead to open discussions and debates in America and elsewhere on the growing amount of self-censorship among individuals and societies confronted by highly combative cultures that allow no criticism of their sacred beliefs.

  Such a culture created the fierce and fatal demonstrations against the cartoons in the Danish newspaper.

  Or, as Rose put it in a Fall 2007 Middle East Quarterly discussion by him and Naser Khader (“Reflections on the Danish Cartoon Controversy”):

  When the twelve cartoonists and I received death threats, newspapers were closed in Russia and Malaysia, and newspaper editors were jailed in Jordan and Yemen, at that point it became an issue exclusively about free speech.

  Amid the violent responses elsewhere to the publication of the Danish cartoons, in the United States reactions were so intimidating that while the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune described these bristling cartoons in words, these newspapers— in the land of the First Amendment guarantee of a free press—refused to print the cartoons themselves.

  But a very few U.S. newspapers did: the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Sun, and the Village Voice. I was then a columnist at the Voice, and my story on the cartoons included the most controversial of the cartoons—Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

  It never occurred to me not to publish the cartoon, nor was I surprised when I too received death threats. For some weeks afterwards, walking the streets of Greenwich Village, where the Voice was published and where I live, I occasionally glanced quickly into passing baby carriages to see if machine guns were nestled there.

  Also, as a reporter, I traced in the Voice and other publications—as I wrote in my February 2, 2009, Washington Times column—how the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which has permanent status at the United Nations, got the UN General Assembly to pass a nonbinding resolution urging nations to provide “adequate protections in their laws or constitutions against ‘acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general.’” Only Islam and Muslims were specifically mentioned in the resolution. The vote was 83 to 53, with the United States among those in opposition.

  In “Why I Published Those Cartoons” (February 19, 2006), Flemming Rose wrote:

  We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: we are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding Muslims.

  Tell that to the majority of the UN General Assembly that voted against the defamation of religions. And tell it to the 57 nations that are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference who supported that resolution to punish defamation of religion worldwide.

  Further evidence of how valuable this book will be for generations to come is Flemming Rose’s stalwart account about how infectiously widespread the visceral hostility to free speech can be:

  Everywhere I go, I seem to provoke controversy. At American universities, I’ve been met by placards and students protesting against my speaking. When I was scheduled to lecture at a university in Jerusalem, a demonstration called for my removal. When I talked about freedom of speech at a UNESCO conference in Doha last spring, local media branded me the “the Danish Satan,” the authorities were inundated with angry emails, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs set up a hotline for citizens who complained about my having even been allowed into the country.

  Flemming Rose, welcome to the Cato Institute, where free speech is as natural as the weather. It’s a climate you will find hospitable.

  You, sir, are a model to the world of unyielding individual liberty.

  —Nat Hentoff

  1. From Where I Stand

  It’s a Sunday morning in 2009, and I’m standing under the shower in a hotel room in Lyon. Rain drums against the window; at the end of a narrow street, I can just see one of the two rivers that flow through the city. In an hour, I’m due at city hall to participate in a panel discussion organized by the French newspaper Libération on challenges to free speech in Europe. I’ve been doing a lot of that kind of thing in the past several years. Yesterday, I was in Paris. Earlier in the week, I was involved in a heated exchange at a conference in Berlin about Muslims and Islam in the European media.

  As I began speaking, a member of the audience stood up, approached the panel, and in a voice trembling with fury demanded to know who had given me the right to tell Muslims like her about democracy. She then turned toward the organizers, angrily asked how they could even consider inviting someone like me, and then stormed out of the room.

  Everywhere I go, I seem to provoke controversy. At American universities, I’ve been met by placards and students protesting against my s
peaking. When I was scheduled to lecture at a university in Jerusalem, a demonstration called for my removal. When I talked about freedom of speech at a UNESCO conference in Doha last spring, local media branded me the “the Danish Satan,”1 the authorities were inundated with angry emails, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs set up a hotline for citizens who complained about my having even been allowed into the country.

  In the spring of 2006, I was invited by the Oxford Union to take part in a discussion on freedom of speech, democracy, and respect for religious sentiment. That body is accustomed to controversy. Nevertheless, my visit turned into what local media alleged was the biggest security operation the city had seen since Michael Jackson’s visit in 2001.

  When I was invited to the World Association of Newspapers’ forum in Moscow a few years ago, Russian authorities politely yet firmly implied that they would like me to stay away. I didn’t fully comprehend their hints, so I went to Moscow oblivious. Since then, I have been unable to secure a visa, although I am married to a Russian and lived in Moscow under Soviet rule as a foreign correspondent for 12 years. During that time, though I was clearly anti-communist and openly socialized with dissidents, visas were never a problem.2

  I could go on citing similar incidents, but what would be the point? On this autumn morning, the picture seems clear. I have become a figure many love to hate. Some would like to see me dead. I have wracked my brain trying to figure out why. I am not by nature a provocative person. I do not seek conflict for its own sake, and it gives me no pleasure when people take offense at things I have said or done. Nevertheless, I have been branded by many as a careless troublemaker who pays no heed to the consequences of his actions.

  How did that happen? To the world, I am known as an editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. In September 2005, I commissioned and published a number of cartoons about Islam, prompted by my perception of self-censorship by the European media. One of those cartoons, drawn by the artist Kurt Westergaard, depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammad with a bomb wrapped in his turban. Among the other cartoons we published was another that mocked the newspaper and even myself for commissioning them, but it was Westergaard’s image that would change my life.

  The Cartoon Crisis, as it became known, spiraled into a violent international uproar, as Muslims around the world erupted in protest. Danish embassies were attacked, and more than 200 deaths were attributed to the protests.3 I came to symbolize one of the defining issues of our era: the tension between respect for cultural diversity and the protection of democratic freedoms. This book is an attempt to reconcile that public symbolism with my personal story.

  How did the publication of a few cartoons prompt an upheaval so extreme that, five years on, I was still grappling with it? As with most monumental events, there seems to be no simple explanation. Some believe that my newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, carries the main responsibility for the uproar, while others point to Danish imams who traveled around the Middle East inflaming Muslim opinion. Some believe Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is the main villain because he did not criticize the cartoons and refused to discuss them with ambassadors from Muslim countries. Still others feel the Organization of the Islamic Conference played a decisive part in orchestrating a conflict to promote that body’s rather specific take on human rights, involving an effort to criminalize criticism of Islam under the somewhat ambiguous label “Islamophobia.” Many say countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan took advantage of the cartoons to divert attention from domestic problems. Yet others view the clash as part of a broader struggle between Islam and the West, exploited by radical Islamists to spur followers toward a holy war. Finally, there are those who blame the secular unbelief of most Danes for their failure to understand the religious sensitivities of Muslims.

  Even though the drawings were conceived in a Danish and European context, the debate is global. It touches on issues fundamental to any kind of society: freedom of speech and of religion, tolerance and intolerance, immigration and integration, Islam and Europe, majorities and minorities, and globalization, to name but a few.

  What do you do when suddenly the entire world is on your back? When one misunderstanding leads to another? When what you have said and done has the world seething with anger and indignation? What do you say to people who ask how you can sleep at night when hundreds of people have died because of what you have done?

  What do you say when you are accused of being a racist or a fascist, and of wanting to start the next world war?

  In the past five years, I have spent most of my energy trying to address and to understand the criticism that has been leveled at my newspaper and at me. Physically and mentally, it has been an arduous journey: educational, but on occasion overwhelming. I have engaged with people on all sides of the political spectrum, with friends and enemies, believers and nonbelievers of every stripe. Oddly enough, the dividing lines between us don’t coincide with the kinds of political, religious, cultural, or geographic categories one might expect. I don’t claim that most Muslims have been on my side, but some have supported publication of the cartoons, while some Christians and atheists have strongly condemned them.

  I have compiled an enormous archive of comments and analyses on the Cartoon Crisis from all over the world. At first, I wanted to document that I was right and that others were wrong. But along the way, I found that I needed to look inward, to reflect on my own history and background. Why was this debate so important for me? Why was I from the outset, almost instinctively, able to identify the core issue?

  Why did the abstract principle of freedom of speech speak to me more than it apparently did to other people?

  I do have strong opinions when it comes to certain things. But I am not a person who takes an instant stand on just anything. I am a natural skeptic. I ponder at length and lose myself in layers of meaning and the many sides of an issue. I don’t see that trait as a flaw: it is the condition of modern man and indeed the core strength of secular democracies, which are founded on the idea that there is no monopoly on truth. Doubt is the germ of curiosity and critical questioning, and its prerequisite is a strong sense of self, a courage that leaves room for debate.4

  Of course, doubt is by no means unequivocally a good thing. Questioning everything may lead to the point where there seem to be no truths and everything appears equally right or wrong. In a world of such relativity, there is no fundamental difference between the prisoner in a concentration camp and the regime that incarcerates him, between perpetrator and victim, between those who defend and those who suppress freedom.

  That existential dimension of politics first became apparent to me when I traveled to the Soviet Union as a student in 1980. I had no strong preconceptions about the country; politics was peripheral to my youth. What occupied me most were the more esoteric challenges of philosophy, and I was eager to learn more about Russian culture. A long time passed before I began to draw conclusions.

  I met my wife that first year and later spent a decade as a correspondent based in Moscow. Over the years, the gravity of life gradually dawned on me. Growing up in Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s during a time of youthful rebellion, I was naturally imbued with the era’s atmosphere of freedom and community. Now, it struck me that freedom could not be taken for granted. People paid a high price for expressing their views. Words meant a great deal—they involved consequences. People were so fearful that official censorship was almost an afterthought. There reigned a tyranny of silence.

  All stories begin and end with individuals, their choices and decisions. When I interviewed the author Salman Rushdie in 2009, he articulated a problem with which I had struggled in the wake of the Cartoon Crisis.5 I had difficulty coming to terms with the fact that others were telling my story and interpreting my motives without, I felt, knowing who I was. When we spoke, Rushdie observed that from childhood, we use storytelling as a way of defining and understanding ourselves. It is a phenomenon that derives from a language instinct that is un
iversal and innate in human nature. Any attempt to restrict that impulse isn’t just censorship or a political violation of freedom of speech; it is an act of violence against human nature, an existential assault that turns people into something they are not. What differentiates open and closed societies is the right to tell and retell our own and other people’s stories.

  In the open society, history moves forward through the exchange of new narratives. Think of slavery in the United States, National Socialism in Germany, and communism in the Eastern Bloc, each overcome by challenges to the conventional way of telling the story. In closed societies, the narrative is dictated by the state, and the individual is reduced to a silent, passive object. Dissident voices are punished and censored.

  In a democracy, no one can claim the exclusive right to tell certain stories. That means, to me, that Muslims have the right to tell jokes and critical stories about Jews, while nonbelievers may skewer Islam in any way they wish. Whites can laugh at blacks, and blacks at whites. To assert that only minorities may tell jokes about themselves, or criticize other minorities, is both grossly discriminating and foolish. By such logic, only Nazis may criticize Nazis, since in present-day Europe they are a persecuted and marginalized minority. Today, a majority of the world opposes female circumcision, forced marriages, and ritual violence against women. Should we be unable to criticize cultures that still adhere to those practices because they are minorities? According to some of Europe’s militant multiculturalists, the answer is yes. But people in democracies should not be forced to live inside echo chambers in which the like-minded tend only to reinforce their own opinions. It is vital to transgress borders between societal groups through dialogue, and it is important to be exposed to the opinions and beliefs of others. People who talk to one another, exchange views, and tell conflicting stories will affect one another’s way of thinking.

  Rushdie told me that the conflict over the right to tell a certain story was at the center of his own freedom-of-speech controversy. He said: