The Tyranny of Silence Page 12
Headley declared that he had suggested that the operation against the newspaper be reduced from an attack on the building as a whole to the liquidation of the paper’s culture editor, Flemming Rose, and Kurt Westergaard, the artist who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, because Headley felt they were directly responsible for the drawings.
How did that make me feel? By that time, four years after the cartoons were published, I was well aware that I was a potential target for people’s violent feelings on the subject, and it was definitely an unpleasant thought. Still, I felt almost relieved that Headley had decided to target me rather than innocent citizens who had nothing to do with the whole business, other than perhaps being employed by the newspaper that had published the drawings. Kurt Westergaard and I had chosen to take full part in the debate about the cartoons. And although it was absurd that a newspaper editor and a cartoonist should have to consider the risk of violence and murder for printing a drawing, even early on we were both quite aware of the possible consequences.
The nightmare scenario was that random people would be kidnapped or killed in retaliation for the drawings, and that the media and the general public would subsequently hold the newspaper responsible. That was something I would never be able to accept. Yet that scenario, and the sense that the threat of terror suddenly had become unpleasantly real, had a major effect. It was a principal factor in the paper’s decision not to republish Westergaard’s drawing following the news of Headley’s terror plot and the attempt on Westergaard’s life in January 2010.
The newspaper claimed that since most people were by now familiar with the cartoon, there was no need to reprint it every time we mentioned the Cartoon Crisis. That argument was by no means watertight. As one critic noted, articles on President Obama would often be accompanied by pictures even though our readers clearly knew what he looked like, and pieces on 9/11 were usually accompanied by dramatic images of the Twin Towers. Those images were far more ingrained in the public mind than Westergaard’s drawing. The truth was that one attack motivated explicitly by the cartoons had already occurred: a strike against the Danish embassy in Islamabad in June 2008, which cost the lives of six people.6 And now the terrorist circles responsible for the Islamabad attack had been linked to Headley and his plans for an attack in Denmark.
When I met with PET on the morning of October 28, 2009, I had been awake for several hours and had run almost 20 kilometers to rid my body of adrenaline. Mostly, I was worried about whether David Headley had found out where I lived. PET had evidence that he had tried to do so but thought he had failed. That was a relief.
Was I scared? Not really. Was I angry? Not really. I had become used to keeping alert, being watchful of who sat down next to me on the bus, who was standing around when I left a building. In cafés and restaurants, I always sat facing the door. I was on my guard against anyone behaving oddly or who didn’t seem to fit in, but I was also determined to lead as normal a life as possible. I had a running dialogue with myself: If you let this get to you and stop doing things you want, then they’ve already won.
At first, local terror experts failed to take David Headley and his plans to strike at Denmark seriously. He was an American, a family man, of mature age: surely, he could not be some hot-headed jihadi. That impression shifted as more information was released. Headley had played a major role in planning LeT’s attack in Mumbai in November 2008, when 10 terrorists turned the city into a war zone for more than two days, killing 166 and injuring more than 300.
His American identity meant that Headley could operate freely; he opened an office in the name of the company First World Immigration Services and traveled to Mumbai repeatedly over a two-year period to carry out intelligence work for LeT, including camera footage of the selected targets around the city and the best landing area for the terrorists’ dinghy. The detailed nature of Headley’s intelligence activities during those two years made it difficult to write him off as an amateur.
When Headley’s groundwork for the Mumbai attack was complete, he turned his attention to Jyllands-Posten. The method was the same: espionage carried out under the cover of representing First World Immigration Services. He gathered information and video footage, which he then forwarded to those who were to carry out the attack: hideouts, cafés, routes, and distances, so people unfamiliar with Copenhagen could get an idea of buildings and locations and find their way around. But apparently, by the spring of 2009, LeT’s interest in the project was waning. The operation was laid aside indefinitely, in favor of renewed strikes against India.
Headley was determined to carry out the attack on Jyllands-Posten and continued planning it with Abdur Rehman Hashim, an old acquaintance from Headley’s days at cadet college in Punjab. Hashim was by now a retired major of the Pakistani armed forces and had links to LeT and to Ilyas Kashmiri,7 who had allied himself with al Qaeda sometime in 2005. According to official American sources in Chicago cited by the Copenhagen daily Politiken, plans for the attack on Jyllands-Posten were in their final stages when Headley was apprehended.
The day after the FBI and PET released the news of Headley’s terror plot, I received an email from the chief editor of Die Welt asking me to write a piece for that newspaper under the headline “Was It Worth It?”
“Do I regret that Jyllands-Posten published the Muhammad cartoons?” I wrote.
I think that is a misguided description of what’s at stake; it’s like asking a rape victim whether she regrets having worn a short skirt when she went out on Friday night. In Denmark, putting on a short skirt to go out dancing is not an invitation to rape. Similarly, publishing cartoons ridiculing people who bomb airplanes, trains, and buildings in the name of religion is not an invitation to terror and violence. Religious satire is a lawful and quite normal activity. What kind of civilization do we have in Europe if we are to do without humor and the right to ridicule terrorists?
There is nothing wrong with criticizing Westergaard, his drawings, or the whole cartoon project. You can call the images childish, tasteless, and unnecessarily provocative; you can say they’re done by a second-rate artist, an attention-seeking amateur or worse—that’s what free and open discussion means. But it is absolutely deplorable that some people blamed Westergaard, or our newspaper, for the terrorist threats on Danish targets. There is a big difference between a blasphemous drawing—“a crime without a victim,” as Salman Rushdie called it—and violent terror.
When the crisis was at its peak, in February 2006, I was asked by Danmarks Radio, the country’s leading public-service media, how many bombs had to go off before Jyllands-Posten would apologize. Implicit in that question was the view that the newspaper and I would be to blame if there were a terrorist attack. It was by no means an uncommon charge. In letters to the editor and at public discussions, I was continually being asked how I could sleep at night, being responsible for the deaths of innocent people. Certain individuals demanded my resignation in the interest of domestic security and Denmark’s reputation in the international community. Danish and foreign media habitually stated that the drawings had incited riots and killings. In September 2007, the New York Times wrote that the cartoons had “incited violent and even deadly protests in other countries.”8
That is dangerous logic, popular among fanatics who equate blasphemy and terror and widespread in countries like Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, where both are crimes punishable by death. It is a reverse logic that involves evaluating speech on the basis of the reactions it generates, without considering whether those reactions are proportionate or reasonable, or whether the speech is legal or meaningful. Basically, it amounts to giving people who feel like reacting with violence a free hand to decide whether a speech incites terror.
Kenan Malik, author of an excellent book on the lessons of the Rushdie affair,9 has analyzed that sort of equation among those who held the author of The Satanic Verses responsible for deaths that occurred in protests against it. In Malik’s view, none of us
can control or determine the reactions of others to what we say. And words or images cannot in themselves cause any action. The individual has to assume responsibility for what he or she does. Fanatics and racists, of course, are influenced by fanatical and racist speech, but the responsibility for turning speech into actions is entirely their own. Legislation against hate speech blurs the distinction between word and actions, only undermining our understanding of the nature of human actions and moral responsibility.
Shooting the messenger is an old habit. During the Cold War, dissidents were often accused of destabilizing East–West relations via their appeals to the West to put pressure on Soviet client regimes. They got in the way of doing business. According to a Danish newspaper editor, one Danish diplomat told him in the 1980s that it would be disastrous for Europe if too many figures like Polish trade union leader Lech Walesa were to appear in the Eastern Bloc. Walesa and his Solidarity movement, who forced the Polish regime to the negotiation table and played a vital role in the peaceful and civilized transition to democracy in Poland, were demanding freedom and self-determination, but that he viewed as a threat to peace and stability in Europe. It was grotesque, but I had often seen that attitude.
Was it reasonable to blame Jyllands-Posten for rioting and other violence, four months or even four years after the paper published the cartoons? What exactly was the connection between the drawings and the murder of civilians in Libya, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Nigeria? The paper was under pressure, but it often accepted that logic far too quickly. When asked if we would have published the drawings had we known they would lead to violence and killings, the answer was always no. But that response meant that we effectively handed the job of editing the newspaper to fanatics and terrorists thousands of kilometers away.
It goes without saying that no drawing is worth the life of a human being, yet many Muslims firmly believed that Kurt Westergaard and I deserved to die. Seemingly, they were of the opinion that a cartoon could justify a killing. Danish comedian Anders Matthesen came perilously close to subscribing to that logic in early February 2006, at a time when several of the cartoonists involved had been forced into hiding following death threats, and Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Copenhagen and Aarhus had been evacuated because of bomb scares. Matthesen believed that the newspaper and the drawings themselves were to blame for the trouble that had ensued, since violence in his opinion was a natural reaction to affront and only to be expected.
“Try going out on the street. Find a biker and tell him he’s a fat bastard!” the comedian commented in Politiken.10
“You’re perfectly entitled, but in the real world you’re going to get your head kicked in for that kind of thing. Those who did the drawings must be fucking stupid,” he added.
Funny? Well, considering Matthesen had otherwise made an entire career out of poking fun at others and the things they believed in, the logic at least seemed rather warped—quite apart from the fact that he seemed to be equating Muslims with violent criminals.
What Matthesen and those who agreed with him were purposely overlooking in their eagerness to appease violent Islamists was this: people like David Headley, LeT, al Qaeda, and the millions who supported them claimed that Jyllands-Posten and the 12 cartoonists had defamed Islam and the Muslim prophet and not, as they repeatedly stressed, Muslims themselves. The drawings were blasphemous, an affront to the Prophet, not to the feelings of individuals, and blasphemy was punishable by death.
The Islamists not only had an issue with me, Westergaard, and Jyllands-Posten; they also believed parliamentary democracy was blasphemous, that the separation of church and state, freedom of speech and religion, equality of the sexes, and the right to life of homosexuals should never be accepted by Muslim believers. All those issues were an affront to their faith.
The Cartoon Crisis forced Kurt Westergaard to reflect on his upbringing in a restrictive religious environment. Years later, the opportunity to get back at religion using satire came as a release, yet his drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban almost cost him his life. It made him famous too. Kurt Westergaard was a walking piece of history. Fame—or notoriety—and the hassle of navigating daily life became a serious test of his ability to deal with inner feelings of narcissism and vanity that perhaps would prove to be beyond his control.
The Muhammad cartoons led Karim Sørensen onto a perilous sidetrack to his efforts to discover himself and gain control of his life. The decisions he made would make it difficult for him ever to realize the dreams he had taken with him when he immigrated to Denmark.
I too felt prompted by the Cartoon Crisis to delve into questions of my own identity: who I was, what had made me the person I had become, what kinds of experiences had directed my life and left their mark.
I grew up in the Copenhagen suburbs, in Kastrup, close to the city’s international airport. My parents were relatively young when I came into the world. My father drove a taxi and had a milk round, while my mother worked as an office assistant. My youngest brother had just been born when my father left us to move in with a teenager whom he later married and had children with. For a while after that, we drifted from place to place, often unsure of whether we would have roof over our heads the following week. All the while, my mother kept knocking on the doors of housing offices and other public authorities to secure us a permanent place to live.
One of my brothers and I were eventually placed with foster parents in the town of Fredensborg, where we were mostly left to our own devices. Our youngest brother was put in a children’s home. As well as trying to find a home for us, my mother had to hold down a job: her father had cut her off completely. In August 1963, my mother’s brothers contacted the Copenhagen tabloid Ekstra Bladet in the hope of starting an outcry about our plight.
Victor Andreasen, a legendary figure in Danish newspaper history, had just become chief editor. He wanted to make the paper more relevant to people’s daily lives—starting with the housing shortage, which hadn’t yet made the news. Andreasen called in his culture editor, Rachel Bæklund. She went to Copenhagen’s Central Station to meet with my mother, who sat waiting with me and one of my younger brothers. “That story turned out to be my biggest break as a journalist,” Bæklund, age 91, recalled in the spring of 2010. “Everyone was talking about it.”
On Monday, September 2, 1963, Ekstra Bladet began a series of articles titled “Are You Sleeping Well, Mr. Housing Minister?”—a quote from Rachel Bæklund’s story about the homeless single mother and her three children. Most of the front page was devoted to a photo of me and my younger brother with the caption “Mommy, when can we have somewhere to live?”
The piece created a major stir. In the six months or so that followed, Rachel Bæklund put my mother up in her home, accompanied her to the local housing offices, and eventually celebrated when she was allocated a two-room apartment in Kastrup, and my mother could once again unite her children. Shortly after, I began school, and we all embarked on a new life. My father was rarely mentioned.
I did reasonably well at school, socially and academically, although homework became problematic when I hit adolescence. My life revolved around soccer; although I entered college in 1979, studying Russian, all I wanted to be was a professional soccer player. (I had been selected to take part in the national junior competition, so that wasn’t just a flight of fancy.) I was influenced by hippie culture and went around with long hair, an Afghan coat, cotton shirts from India, and cowboy boots. For a while, I smoked a fair amount of pot and despised materialism and status symbols. Religion wasn’t an issue either at home or at school, but I studied transcendental meditation for a while, and then a new, Scandinavian form of meditation known as Acem Meditation.
That discipline had no ready-made, ritualized answers, but an awareness of the complexities of human psychological processes, coupled with the notion that integrity in human relations was essential to personal growth and self-awareness. Tolerance was a key concept, and so was becoming one’
s own confidant, and learning to be close with whatever it was that made you restless, depressed, or aggressive. Meditation meant that I became more interested in addressing my own psychological limitations and their negative effects on my life, and I was less concerned with the ideas of political revolution and social and economic upheavals that captured so many of my generation. My subsequent interest in politics and society grew out of my efforts to understand how internal and external freedoms were related.
In 1982, while I was still studying Russian in college, I began working as an interpreter for the Danish Refugee Council. Two years later, I started working for that organization as a language teacher, and I held the job until 1990, when I was appointed Berlingske Tidende’s first Moscow correspondent. The language school embraced an enormous spectrum of colleagues, and each day was a new journey into foreign cultures. I discovered that the lack of liberty I had seen in the Soviet Union was also a feature of life elsewhere. I saw too how easy it was for a foreigner to feel like an outsider in Denmark: the homogeneity of the culture and the population meant that the slightest accent or the tiniest physical feature revealed you to be foreign. It wasn’t that the Danes disliked foreigners particularly, but they weren’t used to living alongside people from other cultures.
The Soviet émigrés I met had refused to succumb to the lies and the tyranny of silence laid down by their dictatorship. They were idealists, yet the regime seemed to fear them more than it feared foreign armies because they undermined the West’s Kissinger-style realpolitik engagement with the Soviet Union. They attacked it as a betrayal of the founding principles of democracy embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, a document they revered. They were people who went to jail with their heads held high, with a sense of dignity and devotion to what they believed in. Of course, they also had flaws, but they possessed a moral clarity I found inspiring.