The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  Karim compared publication of the Muhammad cartoons with burning the Danish flag. “Jyllands-Posten was well aware that the drawings were going to offend a lot of people,” he said. “I think you did it to provoke and cause trouble. It said to Muslims: this is how we see your religion, and they saw that as a provocation. The drawings could have been done in a different way, more balanced and constructive.”

  “How do you see Kurt Westergaard’s drawing?” I asked.

  “It says Muslims only think about bombing other people,” Karim replied. “Muslims all over the world see a head that’s meant to be the Prophet, and a bomb, and they think the Prophet’s head is going to be blown off. I’m almost a hundred percent sure that’s what most Muslims think. In a way,” Karim continued, “I can understand that an old man like him does a drawing like that when the only things he sees in the media about Islam and Muslims are violence and bombings. So he thinks, ‘Right, that’s what Muslims are like, and the Prophet is the source of their actions,’ but the Prophet wasn’t like that at all.”

  “What would you say to Kurt Westergaard if he were sitting here instead of me?”

  “I would tell him I’m sorry his life and mine have been ruined. Maybe I’d encourage him to read about the Prophet. A lot of people in the West have had a wrong picture of the Prophet through history.”

  “Is there anything you regret?”

  “I regret a little bit hanging out with people with extremist opinions. I don’t regret it as a person, but it’s the reason I’m where I am now. It was my way of finding out what’s right and what’s wrong,” he explained. “I believe you have to find things out for yourself and not shut yourself off. I wanted to study things for myself and investigate the various thoughts and ideas that are found in Islam. Because of that, I’m sitting here now.”

  Karim Sørensen left Denmark in August 2008 with his wife, a Somali. The police were reluctant to charge him with planning to murder Kurt Westergaard, so initially they settled on expelling him to Tunisia, his country of citizenship. However, the Danish authorities were unable to send him back because, according to human rights organizations, Karim risked being subjected to torture in Tunisia. Thus, he was accorded so-called tolerated residence in Denmark, with restrictions on his freedom of movement. Thus, it was not until August that Karim agreed to be escorted to Copenhagen Airport and to sign a document that he would never set foot in Denmark again. He was flown to Syria, from where he went on to an unknown Arab country. In 2009, his wife gave birth to their first child—in Denmark.

  Karim Sørensen’s story was in many ways typical of many young men of Muslim background who went to Europe seeking the good life. Their dream involved getting an education, enjoying newfound freedoms, and finding a good job that would allow them to look after families who had remained behind. But when the dream collided with reality, the new life proved problematic, plans went askew, and choices made along the way barred the path to integrating into the wider community, Karim Sørensen ran into an identity crisis. Who am I? Why can’t I find a job? Why do my relationships always fall apart? Karim found his answer in Islam.

  But it was not the Islam he knew from his home culture in Tunisia, and on which almost all social institutions in his home country were based. The Islam he chose was a revolutionary identity that saw itself in opposition to the society that Karim had come to join. It was an identity that suddenly transformed him from loser to winner, from patsy to foe. Karim’s new identity needed to be brandished;4 and what act more actively demonstrates his belief than cutting the throat of someone who had defamed the Muslim prophet? In the eyes of Karim Sørensen’s radical cobelievers, he would become a hero, a certified good Muslim, if he killed Kurt Westergaard.

  To me, Karim Sørensen did not seem like the kind of person who harbored especially dark thoughts or who was predisposed to killing old men. All he wanted was to get a grip on his life, to regain his crumbling self-confidence, and to amount to something. The radical imams and the community of the mosque were able to deliver that, but the price was his rejecting any compromise between Islam and the society that surrounded him. His hope was that it would make him a winner. Instead, he ended up, in the words of German author-poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “the radical loser.”5

  6. Aftershock I

  Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 27, 2009, I received a phone call from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET). I was in my office struggling with a leading article for the next day’s paper. The words weren’t flowing as I wanted them to, but nevertheless the piece was almost done when the phone rang. A familiar voice on the other end told me two men had been arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Chicago, thereby foiling an imminent attack on Jyllands-Posten that had specifically targeted Kurt Westergaard and me. The PET agent refused to go into details but suggested we meet as soon as possible so he and his colleagues could brief me on the situation and discuss measures for my safety. We agreed on the following morning at my home.

  I had hardly put the phone down when it rang again. This time it was Bloomberg News in New York wanting a comment on the story that was now on its way around the globe, since the FBI had apparently released information about a thwarted terror attack against Denmark.

  In the days that followed, I was bombarded with phone calls and text messages from reporters near and far, but I had nothing to add. What are you supposed to say when a studio anchor asks how it feels to have terrorists planning to kill you? It wasn’t an amusing thought, but I had not suffered physically; there had been no angry Muslim appearing out of nowhere; no sudden cry of “Allahu akbar”; no flailing axe as Kurt Westergaard had been subjected to only two months before. It was all somewhat hypothetical, and the drama of the situation to a large extent hinged on my own imagination.

  I took note of PET’s information, turned my phone to mute, and went back to work. Because of the unexpected interruption that afternoon, I was forced to reschedule a meeting with a colleague, so we met up later over coffee. I played the whole thing down: just another day at the office.

  I had been incensed the first time some lunatic put a price on my head; there was a rush of adrenaline. But with time, it became apparent that those threats came mostly from rather impulsive individuals with neither the patience nor the intellectual wherewithal to carry them through, and I had become more detached and rational about it. Not that it didn’t bother me, because it did, but I simply realized that keeping a cool head was to my own advantage, as well as that of my family and colleagues.

  When I returned from coffee, I called managing editor Jørn Mikkelsen. I didn’t think we could publish the next day without a leading article on the Chicago arrests. Jørn agreed but felt that under the circumstances, someone else should do the piece. Still, I offered to write up a draft and sat down to begin. We ran the article the next day.1

  Terror, threats and intimidation are weapons used to change behavior, to make people act in accordance with the wishes of the terrorists. . . . Those responsible for threats and planned attacks against Jyllands-Posten are dissatisfied with the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. They have demanded the drawings be banned, and they have sought to intimidate the Danish public. Regrettably, albeit perhaps understandably from a psychological point of view, some people have identified this newspaper as responsible for the threat of terror that has been issued against our nation. They are misguided. Nothing can justify the use of violence or threats against citizens practicing their statutory rights. We would do well to keep this in mind—for the sake of liberty and security.

  We know from history that if we submit to terror and threats, what we do not get is less terror and fewer threats. What we get is more terror and more threats. When an individual, media, or society submits to intimidation, the message it sends to the terrorist is that his despicable and contemptible actions work. The most effective weapon we have against threats of terror is therefore to show that we do not intend to succumb; we do not
intend to sell out the principles that are the foundation of our liberty and welfare. In that way we make it clear to those who wish to put an end to freedom of speech that no matter what they do, no matter how much they intimidate, we shall continue to do as we always have done, even to the extent of “scorn, mockery and ridicule.”

  The article concluded:

  What poses the greatest threat to our liberty is “insult fundamentalism.” It presupposes that feeling insulted is accompanied by a special right to react with violence, and it runs all the way through our era’s multiple efforts to impose restrictions on free speech. The time is now ripe to reject this.

  Before going home that evening, I had given the paper a short interview and had phoned my children. One of them was sitting at home watching the television news and was rather worried; my other child took things easier. My wife Natasha was away taking a course and hadn’t heard the news at all. Fortunately, she was more interested in my reading through her paper on project management, which she was to present a few days later.

  Before leaving the office at about 8:30 p.m., I printed out copies of the indictments against the two men who had been apprehended in Chicago: an American and a Canadian, both of Pakistani origin. Following dinner, I sat down to study the FBI’s summary of the case against the American, David Headley.2

  He had visited Denmark on two occasions in 2009, with the aim of planning a terrorist attack on Jyllands-Posten, and he had already purchased a third ticket to Copenhagen for late October 2009. When apprehended at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, he had been about to board a flight to Philadelphia; from there, he had intended to travel to Pakistan to meet up with a known terrorist leader in northern Waziristan, a mountainous tribal region bordering Afghanistan that is often referred to as the headquarters of international terrorism. Most likely, Headley was going to finalize details of the strike against Denmark.

  Who was this David Headley?3 He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1960 as Daood Sayed Gilani. His father, who died in 2008, was a Pakistani radio broadcaster, diplomat, music scholar, and poet who worked for Radio Pakistan for 40 years. Serrill Headley, David’s mother, came from a small town outside Philadelphia and moved to the U.S. capital in the 1950s to take a secretarial job at the Pakistani embassy. She met her future husband, and the couple left the United States in 1960 with their newborn son, Daood, to take up residence in Pakistan.

  For Serrill Headley, the move was an enormous culture shock. She found it difficult to come to terms with the role of women in Pakistani society. The marriage fell apart, and following a court case in which she lost custody of her two children—Daood and his younger sister—she returned to the United States in the 1970s. “In Pakistan, men own the children. Women have no rights,” she later commented in an interview.

  In 1973, Serrill Headley purchased a bar in Philadelphia, which she promptly named the Khyber Pass, turning the place into a popular music venue with hippie décor. At that time, Daood was attending a military school for children of the elite in Pakistan’s Punjab Province. Here, he befriended Tahawwur Rana, whose acquaintance he renewed many years later in Chicago in connection with the plans against Jyllands-Posten and scheduled terror attacks in India. Rana was arrested in Chicago two weeks after David Headley was apprehended. Whereas Rana did well in school, Daood had difficulty concentrating on academic work. He often failed in mathematics and preferred sports to homework.

  In the summer of 1977, Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ousted in a military coup and later executed. Power was seized by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a brutal dictator who initiated the country’s all-encompassing Islamification. Those developments were a source of concern for Headley’s mother, who, with the help of her former husband, managed to convince the 17-year-old Daood to move to Philadelphia, where he gained admittance to the Valley Forge Military Academy and College.

  Daood dropped out after a single semester. Later, he made an unsuccessful bid to become an accountant. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the young man was appalled at seeing his mother selling hard liquor behind a bar and generally behaving rather differently from women at home in Pakistan. Serrill Headley later handed the business over to her son. She died in 2008 at the age of 68.

  After an upbringing characterized by discipline and limited contact with the opposite sex, Headley made up for all the things he’d missed in a big way. In the 1980s, he became addicted to drugs and piloted the bar into financial ruin until it was finally sold. When his mother moved to New York, he went with her, opening two video stores in Manhattan. There were regular trips to Pakistan, where he made use of his contacts to smuggle heroin into the United States. In 1988, he was arrested by U.S. narcotics officers at Frankfurt Airport while carrying two kilos of heroin. Opting to cooperate, he ended up with a relatively short four-year prison sentence after leading some of his regular customers into the arms of the police.

  In 1997, he was apprehended a second time for the same offense, once again electing to cooperate with authorities by informing on those to whom he was selling. This time, he received 15 months in prison, whereas his partner was sentenced to 10 years. Headley was released with the approval of the Drug Enforcement Agency after serving only six months. In late 2001, Headley’s lawyer and the prosecutor requested that the parole period following Headley’s release (which was supposed to extend until 2004) should be annulled. The request was accepted. Less than two months later, with America still licking its wounds in the wake of 9/11, Headley traveled to Pakistan, where by his own account he paid his first visit to a training camp run by the terror organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

  LeT, “Army of the Pure,” was set up in the early 1990s as the military wing of Islamist movement Markaz-ad-Dawa-wal-Irshad, which in the early 1980s had recruited soldiers to oppose the Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan.4 LeT received funding from, and was trained by, the Pakistani military intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence, in return for carrying out attacks and acts of terror against Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir, Indian provinces to which Pakistan laid claim.

  According to Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States and a former scholar at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the organization later received funding from Saudi Arabia and formulated as its aim the gathering of all countries in the region of Pakistan into a single theocratic state devoted to Wahhabism, a radical version of Islam that has inspired a number of modern terror organizations, as well as forming the religious basis of the Saudi regime.5 LeT ran schools, hospitals, farms, markets, and entire housing areas. But in 2002, the United States termed it a terror organization, and it was subsequently banned by Pakistani authorities—although experts cautioned that it continued to enjoy widespread support in the Pakistani intelligence agency.

  David Headley’s first sojourn in a LeT training camp was a three-week introduction to the organization’s ideological universe. During the two years that followed, Headley took part in four training sessions, lasting from three weeks to three months. He learned to operate firearms and grenades and was trained in hand-to-hand combat, survival techniques, surveillance, and counterespionage.

  Now a member of LeT, Headley moved to Chicago sometime around 2005 with his Pakistani wife and their four children. They rented an apartment that had been vacant since the death of its previous occupant. In order to conceal his tracks, Headley did not change the name of the tenant on the lease. He repeated the trick for his mobile phone. Headley spoke both English and Urdu without an accent and was able to move seamlessly between the two cultures. Those abilities made him attractive to Islamic terror groups, yet Headley was conflicted. Though he idealized the strict Islamic lifestyle, he continued an affair with a non-Muslim woman in New York.

  “‘Infidels.’ He would use words like that,” his first American wife told the Philadelphia Inquirer in the autumn of 2009. “When he would see an Indian person in the street, he used to spit, spit in the street to
make a point. I guess he was torn between two cultures. I think he liked both. He didn’t know how to blend them.”

  According to the FBI, Headley first traveled to Denmark in January 2009. By that time, he had changed his name from Daood Sayed Gilani to David Coleman Headley, in order to be able to travel more easily through post-9/11 security. Claiming to be representing a company called First World Immigration Services that was planning an advertising campaign, he managed to meet with advertising salespeople in the Jyllands-Posten offices in both Copenhagen and Aarhus. He then flew to Pakistan, where he met with representatives of LeT and with Ilyas Kashmiri, a notorious terrorist leader holed up in northern Waziristan.

  Subsequently, the FBI investigation turned up evidence that Headley had already discussed a possible terror attack against Jyllands-Posten. In October 2008, he had met with a member of LeT who urged him to begin planning as soon as possible. At about the same time, he vented his anger at the Muhammad drawings in an Internet forum for former pupils of the cadet college in Punjab that he had attended in the 1970s. “Call me old-fashioned,” he wrote on October 29, 2008, “but I feel disposed towards violence for the offending parties.”

  Headley flew to Denmark for the second time in July 2009. According to the FBI, he met with an al Qaeda cell in the United Kingdom, which he had contacted via Kashmiri. That cell would carry out the attack. Kashmiri had suggested two possible plans of attack. Headley could drive a truckful of explosives into the Jyllands-Posten building, or a group of warriors could force their way in, murder indiscriminately, and then throw the headless bodies out the windows so as to gain maximum exposure. But according to page seven of the FBI report: