The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  European Muslims, too, paralleled their situation with the plight of the Jews in the Germany of the 1930s. That deliberate cultivation of the role of victim is part of a contemporary grievance culture that I feel is poisonous to integration and equality in a democratic society. In many cases, Islam and Muslims were actually given special treatment. A number of European countries have adopted legislation specifically created to protect Muslims and Islam against mockery. One British government minister insisted on referring to acts of terrorism committed by Muslims in the name of their religion as “anti-Islamic activity.”22 The BBC similarly stopped using the expression “Islamic terrorists” following a complaint lodged by the Muslim Council of Britain.23 Muslim organizations took on a partner role for governments throughout Europe and received public funding. Prayer rooms were established in many workplaces and in public institutions. Kindergartens and schools served halal food, and public swimming pools separated men and women at certain times of the day, all to accommodate Muslim demands. The archbishop of Canterbury and scholars of Islam supported the introduction of elements of Islamic law in the European systems of justice.24

  The situation of the German Jews following Hitler’s takeover of power in January 1933 was dramatically different. Jews were interned in concentration camps and hardly a week passed without street violence targeting the Jewish community. Jewish shops and businesses were vandalized; the general public was urged to boycott them; and numerous Jewish people were openly murdered on the streets. In the years that followed, Jews were barred from taking on positions as lawyers, doctors, and journalists. Jews were unable to use public hospitals; they were prohibited from working in the public sector; and after the age of 14, they lost the right to public education. Public parks, beaches, and seaside hotels were closed to Jews. Street benches and seats on trains and on busses were marked so that Jews and Germans remained separated. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of citizenship rights; marriage between German citizens and Jews was forbidden, as was extramarital sex with Jews. Less than two years after the Nazis took power, some 50,000 Jews, amounting to 10 percent of the Jewish population, had fled Germany. When war broke out, fewer than 100,000 remained. Violence against the Jews permeated society from top to bottom, staged by the authorities.25 The Jews were subhuman. All of those measures involved not merely words, but actions discriminating against and sanctioning persecution of the Jewish community.

  Victor Klemperer, professor of literature and a prominent scholar of the French Enlightenment, himself Jewish, noted in his diary as early as the spring of 1933, “No one breathes freely, no word is free, neither printed nor spoken.”26

  I find it astonishing that even intelligent people can bring themselves to parallel the plight of the Jews before World War II with the situation of Muslims in the 21st century. Such statements must result from extreme ignorance, irrational hatred of one’s own civilization, or a guilt complex that fills the air with ghosts. Claims from Muslim spokesmen to the effect that an anti-Muslim storm is brewing over Europe and will end in Muslims, like the Jews before them, being sent to the gas chambers are rarely countered directly as the nonsense they are.

  Of course, there is no lack of examples of Muslims being subjected to discrimination and demonization, and that indeed should be fought.

  However, at the beginning of the new millennium, European Muslims enjoy all the same rights as all other citizens of Europe; in some cases, they are even afforded preferential treatment compared with representatives of other minorities. By contrast, the Jews enduring German Nazism of the 1930s were systematically deprived of the rights enjoyed by all other citizens of the Third Reich. The real issue about Muslims and civil rights is that many Muslims who enjoy the freedom of civil liberties in Europe are often prevented from doing so within their own Muslim communities. That is especially true of women, homosexuals, and those who have renounced their faith.

  Kurt Westergaard’s drawing of Muhammad caused offense, though not always of the kind associated with riots in the Islamic world. In February 2006, a 72-year-old Iranian standing outside the Danish embassy in Tehran identified the insult suffered by his government. That hired revolutionary had not set eyes on Westergaard’s cartoon before instructing Iranian students to hurl Molotov cocktails at the embassy. Later, when he met with that man in his house outside Tehran, Danish television journalist Karsten Kjær showed him the infamous drawing.

  The elderly demonstrator was explaining that someone had told him the Prophet had been insulted and that he was to organize a demonstration. He duly followed orders, though he had never seen the offending drawing. On being shown the image that allegedly incensed 1 billion Muslims, the man smiled into his beard and with a gleam in his eye put his astonishment—or was it affront?—into words:

  “He looks more like a Sikh than a Persian.”27

  Not a word about the bomb in the turban.

  5. The Pathway to God

  For you don’t count the dead

  When God’s on your side.

  —Bob Dylan

  A much repeated claim by Muslim spokesmen around the world at the height of the Cartoon Crisis was that 1.3 billion Muslims had been offended by the 12 drawings. No doubt, many did indeed feel they had suffered an affront, regardless of whether or not they had seen the drawings. Likewise, no doubt, many people of Muslim background were offended at being cited in support of that view when no one had bothered to ask them about it. Such manipulation of Muslim opinion actually prompted several ex-Muslims living in European countries to step forward publicly and insist on their right of apostasy—the rejection of their former religion—which in some Muslim countries was (and is) deemed a “crime” punishable by death.1

  One of those who certainly did take offense at the Muhammad cartoons—on his own behalf, as well as that of his cobelievers—was a young man from Tunisia. So offended was he that according to Danish police he took it upon himself to try to murder Kurt Westergaard, who at the time was 72 years old. That young man was Karim Sørensen. He had come to Denmark in 2000 and had married a Danish woman he had met in his hometown of Sousse, a popular holiday destination on the Tunisian coast. Some seven years later, he was apprehended by police in the early hours of Tuesday, February 12, 2008, in a suburb of Denmark’s second-largest city Aarhus. According to the charges brought against him, he had conspired with two others—a Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and a Tunisian—to kill Kurt Westergaard at his home. The intended method was strangulation.

  A search of Karim’s home yielded a pistol and two axes, as well as a note on a calendar detailing a route to Kurt Westergaard’s address. One of the two Tunisians proved to have a large sum of money in his apartment. According to his wife, that money was for a car, most likely to be used by the assassins to escape through Europe after the attack. The Danish citizen was released without charges, but the two Tunisians were administratively expelled from the country—a decision their lawyers appealed, claiming that their clients risked being subjected to torture should they be returned to Tunisia.2

  I wanted to interview Karim for Jyllands-Posten, and I contacted his lawyer. To my surprise, Karim accepted the opportunity to convince Danish readers that he had never planned to kill Kurt Westergaard. When I called the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) to arrange a time for the interview, the agents’ first reaction was that my request was an April Fool’s joke. The evening before the interview, a PET agent telephoned me to ask me to come much earlier than already agreed, and to get off the train at a different station where he would pick me up and drive me the rest of the way. The same agent called me again as I sat on the train for Køge, half an hour south of Copenhagen. He told me where his car was parked; its make, color, and license plate number; and what he was wearing, black pants and a black jacket. I found him immediately. When I got in the car, he tried to talk me out of doing the interview.

  I politely declined, and we set off for Køge. On the way, the agent told me that our meetin
g had been moved for security reasons from the remand center to a local police station. He explained that Karim and I would be placed at each side of a wide table that would impede physical contact. We would be escorted in and out of the room through different doors. Should anything untoward happen, I was to follow the PET agent. Two others would take care of Karim. When we arrived at the station, the PET agent went through the layout of the building with me, explaining which way we would exit the building should an emergency occur.

  The room was bare. It had a table in the middle, with a chair on each side. Against one wall was a swivel chair on which the PET agent sat while the two police officers remained standing behind Karim. The windows were covered by a transparent material that blocked the sun’s glare. I took out my tape recorder and notebook. Karim was a short, burly young man, nimble on his feet, and obviously in good physical shape. He had close-cropped hair and a little goatee that reminded me of the French soccer player Zinedine Zidane. His teeth were astonishingly white. We shook hands. He was wearing a sky-blue sweatshirt with a hood, jeans, and blue plastic sandals.

  Initially, the atmosphere was a little tense, but soon I felt Karim relax. He seemed smart: open and reflective, rather than introverted or fanatical. He readily answered all my questions and showed no sign of anger or desperation about his situation. It crossed my mind that he could have been one of my pupils when I had taught Danish to immigrants years ago—a model student whom I would have promoted as an example to the others.

  Karim had declared himself not guilty of all charges and had told the press that he had no idea who Kurt Westergaard was or where he lived, a claim police later disproved. Now, he told me his story, beginning with his parents’ unhappy marriage. His father was more or less an alcoholic, whose drinking binges were accompanied by domestic violence. One such attack on his wife resulted in Karim being born two months premature.

  The father was a mechanic, and the mother, a decorator. Karim told me his mother had been forced into the marriage, though she saw it as a chance to get away from her family who treated her like a slave. But the couple divorced when Karim was a year old, and he grew up with his mother. She was poor, without regular work, and eked out a living doing occasional jobs. Money was so tight they often went without food. And they were regularly forced into hiding when Karim’s father would come round to try to take back his son. They found peace only when the father was arrested in Morocco with 20 kilos of cocaine in his car.

  Karim did well at school. No one in the family was particularly religious, and they seldom went to the mosque. Karim wanted to be an astronaut. As an adolescent, he began to take part in combat sports, and he became fascinated by Eastern mysticism and the Eastern religions’ focus on discipline and self-control. He felt doubtful of his future in Tunisia. Around him, he saw a society that was corrupt and rigidly hierarchical. Without money and the right connections, he had no hope of advancement. He became a leading practitioner of shootfighting—a blend of Thai boxing and wrestling—hoping that it might become his ticket to a better life outside of Tunisia.

  One day, his mother came home and told him her boss had refused to pay her the money she was owed. Karim decided to leave the country. He wanted to be able to support his mother financially. A friend told him about the French Foreign Legion; Karim’s combat prowess would help him get in, and after five years’ service he could request French citizenship. But while Karim was getting together the paperwork for his application, he met a Danish woman from Aarhus who was on holiday in Sousse. She fell in love with him, visited him several times, and tried to talk him out of joining the Foreign Legion, inviting him instead to Denmark for Christmas and the New Year. They married. Karim took his wife’s surname and was granted a work permit in Denmark. His wife said that if he found a job, it would cancel out her right to social welfare benefits so instead, he took Danish lessons and joined a shootfighting club in Aarhus.

  “I thought: what am I good at? The answer was combat sports. So I thought I’d give it a go as a career and then try to get started as a security guard when I was finished with language school. I really wanted to be a bodyguard.”

  Karim found work as a doorman at a nightclub in Aarhus and slid into the criminal world. He began drinking and smoking pot, spending less time in the gym. He and his wife divorced. His boss told him that with his French and Arabic, he could get a job as a bodyguard for Saudi princes traveling to Germany and Switzerland. But when war broke out in Iraq, the security firm that employed him ceased all activities in Europe and moved to Iraq. During that time, Karim was convicted for fighting outside the nightclub where he worked. He had attacked an aggressive guest and received 60 days in an open prison. The blot on his record made it difficult to get another steady job.

  Karim moved in with another woman, a single mother with a small child. He felt bad about living off her. In the summer of 2005, they went to Tunisia to visit Karim’s mother. Here, he struggled to put an end to his drug abuse and instead turned to religion. He prayed five times a day. After returning to Denmark, he began attending the mosque in the concrete-block Gellerup area west of Aarhus, where a number of radicalized Muslims lived—among them a former Guantánamo prisoner, Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane; the Moroccan Athmane Meheri, who was later expelled from the country for his part in a terrorist-related bank robbery; and Syrian-born Abu Rached el-Halabi, who according to Spanish police had connections with the 2004 Madrid bombers. The mosque’s spiritual leader was Sheik Raed Hlayhel, a Palestinian imam who had studied in the Saudi city of Medina.3

  “I wanted to use religion to find discipline in my life. I remember when I was a boy, how I looked up to those who prayed and attended mosque,” Karim explained.

  Raed Hlayhel first drew attention to himself with a Friday sermon in February 2005, when he recommended that women be completely covered from head to toe. That was, he said, “a divine order.” He also warned against women going to hairdressers and using strong perfume. “Women,” he said, “can be Satan’s instrument against men.” Later, during the Cartoon Crisis, he claimed that Jyllands-Posten was driven by a Jewish conspiracy against Islam; in the spring of 2006, Hlayhel opined that people like Kurt Westergaard would never be pardoned by Muslims, and the threat of being killed for his blasphemous drawing would be with him for the rest of his life.

  In one of his last Friday sermons before leaving Denmark for good in the autumn of 2006, Hlayhel issued a thinly veiled threat against those who might be tempted to reprint Westergaard’s drawing or to commit any similar form of blasphemy. Karim witnessed that sermon:

  We have Allah on our side, and he who has Allah on his side cannot be overcome. We love death and will sacrifice ourselves before the feet of Allah’s messenger. Abstain therefore from repeating this tragedy, for it will then become your own tragedy and that of the entire world.

  In that environment, Karim—lonely, frustrated, and impressionable—found a new identity that raised him above the infidels among whom he lived and by whom he felt humiliated. He looked up to Raed Hlayhel, considered him his spiritual adviser, and an authoritative scholar of Islam. “He is a wise man. He understands what is going on in our time. He senses how things should be. He is a modern man,” Karim told me as he related how he turned to Islam.

  He rejected the notion that Hlayhel harbored radical views:

  A lot of people think his views are extreme, but it’s not true. I once asked him about 9/11 and the London bombings in 2005, and he said it was wrong to kill innocent people. He referred to verses in the Koran and hadith where there are rules on how to behave in war. He said killing innocent people was forbidden and that you were not to lay a hand on children, women, old men, and those who did not carry arms. Buildings and nature are not to be destroyed either. He said the attacks had damaged Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

  During his religious radicalization, Karim’s relationship collapsed. For a short while, he moved in with a girl he had known before, only to run into another dead end. Ev
entually, he decided to move to Copenhagen and start afresh. “I just wanted to get away; I wanted out of where I was, smoking pot and getting stoned.”

  In the capital, he ran into an Afghan who was involved in a group of radical Muslims, several of whom would be arrested in 2007 and charged with planning acts of terrorism on Danish soil. (Karim’s Afghan friend would be sentenced to 7 years in prison, to be followed by deportation; the ringleader, a Dane of Pakistani origin, received 12 years. He had trained in a camp in the northern part of Pakistan’s Waziristan region, where al Qaeda had set up its new headquarters.) Karim moved in with another acquaintance and began attending the controversial mosque at Heimdalsgade in Copenhagen’s multiethnic Nørrebro district, a mosque frequented by a number of figures convicted of terrorism.

  “I didn’t really know anyone. I took on a few odd jobs to begin with, but otherwise I just sat around waiting for something to do. While I was waiting, I started going to the mosque.”

  I pulled out a copy of the page containing the Muhammad cartoons as published in Jyllands-Posten and ask Karim if he would mind commenting on them. “Sure, why not?” he said. He told me he had seen the drawings just after they were published on September 30, 2005, though he added untruthfully that he had only seen them once. (Police later revealed that the cartoons had been saved on Karim’s computer and had been viewed a number of times.)

  “I thought, what’s all this about? Drawings making fun of the Prophet. I didn’t understand what was going on and couldn’t see anything constructive about it at all,” Karim told me, describing his first reactions to the drawings. He was, he said, annoyed and angered. “It can’t be right that you can offend people like that. If the drawings were done to defend freedom of speech, they shouldn’t have insulted people’s feelings. The least you could have done afterward was apologize.”