The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  Monday, January 30, 15 armed men wearing masks invaded the office of the EU in Gaza and said that all Danes and Norwegians had 48 hours to leave the area.22 The next day, 10,000 people in Gaza demonstrated against the cartoons and burned the Danish flag together with effigies of Denmark’s prime minister.

  In light of the escalating international crisis and boycott of Danish companies, the prime minister tried to calm the waters. He still insisted that he wouldn’t interfere with the press and its decision about the kinds of cartoons to publish, but he made it clear to the Muslim world that he himself would never depict Muhammad and other religious figures in a way that may be perceived as offensive.23

  It didn’t help. The pressure on Denmark was growing. The demand for censorship and punishment in the Muslim world triggered a republication of the cartoons in newspapers across Europe. By the end of February 2006, they had been published in at least 143 newspapers in 56 different countries around the world.24

  Throughout the time of escalation and culmination of the conflict, religious authorities in the Muslim world played a key role. From mid-January until mid-February, they mobilized fellow believers. Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for “a day of rage” on Friday, February 3. His call was heard. After the prayer, there were demonstration in at least 13 countries, and over the next three days, Denmark’s embassies in Damascus, Beirut, and Tehran were attacked and set on fire. In Beirut, one demonstrator was killed. Anger increased owing to false rumors that had been circulating between Muslims in Denmark and the Middle East that the Koran would be burned in a public place in Copenhagen.

  In mid-February, encouraged by a wave of anger against the cartoons, the OIC put forward five demands to the EU: (a) the European Parliament should pass a law criminalizing Islamophobia, (b) the EU and OIC should jointly sponsor a resolution in the UN General Assembly that would call on every member state to criminalize defamation of religion and prophets, (c) the EU should commit itself to new rules for journalistic ethics, (d) new limits on freedom of expression with regard to religious symbols should be imposed, and (e) the recently reformed UN Human Rights Council should operate within new guidelines that would put banning blasphemy and mockery of religion at the top of its agenda.25

  And how did the EU respond to that challenge to its fundamental values? Basically, it left Denmark high and dry. Only a few grasped the relationship between the cartoons and the OIC’s global campaign against freedom of expression, among them the Dutch and countries from the former Eastern Bloc. A book about the Cartoon Crisis put it this way:

  Nobody among the world’s proclaimed defenders of freedom and democracy—the UN, U.S., U.K. and EU—in official statements denounced the fact that lawful speech in a free country was confronted with death threats and threats of violence by religious leaders in other countries and unveiled calls for boycott from political and religious leaders in one nation after another.26

  Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy coordinator, went especially far in accommodating the OIC. On February 2, he called OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, and according to OIC’s summary—Solana didn’t deny it—the top EU bureaucrat’s position was closer to the dictatorships in the Middle East than to the Danish government. Solana assured his counterparts in the OIC that people in Europe saw the publication of the cartoons as an unfortunate action that Europeans looked at with “resentment and disgust.” Then, Solana traveled to the Middle East and at the OIC’s headquarters in Jeddah, he promised that the EU would do its utmost to make sure that that kind of cartoon wouldn’t be published in the future, and he didn’t contradict Ihsanoglu when the OIC secretary general said that the parties had agreed to promote a UN resolution calling for the criminalization of blasphemy and defamation of religious feeling. In the words of the OIC, Solana also supported new journalistic ethics for the EU. It sounded like Solana was willing to concede to every OIC demand. After having met the religious leader of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Solana said that the parties had discussed how to protect religious symbols.

  The final reconciliation between the OIC and EU and the total sellout of freedom of expression were planned for a summit in Qatar on February 25. Solana and Austria’s temporary chair of the EU were supposed to sign an agreement that committed the signatories to promote a global ban on defamation of religious sensibilities. However, Solana and his Austrian colleague never showed up in Qatar because of disagreement among the EU countries. Not everybody was willing to surrender to the OIC. That was confirmed a few days later when the EU limited itself to expressing regret that some people had perceived the cartoons as offensive.

  Spain, a member of the EU, and Turkey, an applicant to the EU, signed the agreement at the summit in Qatar. The two countries and Qatar were behind the Alliance of Civilizations, a forum created to overcome mutual mistrust between the West and the Islamic world. Also present were UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the leaders of the OIC and the Arab League. They all signed the agreement calling for a global ban on defamation of religion, a decision that if implemented would criminalize religious satire, including cartoons of the Muslim prophet.27

  The first week of February 2006 is a blur. I can pick out images of burning embassies, furious crowds, and Danish business leaders tearful about lost jobs and markets. It was emotional, certainly, but I was nonetheless quite clear that I personally had little influence on such external events. The only things I could do was to explain and defend the paper’s reasons for publishing the drawings, and to take part in the debates—on self-censorship and religious sentiment, on immigration and the treatment of minorities in our democracies, on liberal principles, globalization, and the bounds of freedom of speech. But I had already been doing all that for four months. And eventually, I lost sight of the big picture and made a couple of stupid mistakes.

  It came to a head on February 8, on what turned out to be a dramatic day for Jyllands-Posten. Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste spoke afterward of a sense that the earth was opening up under his feet as angry emails began pouring in that evening, and hundreds of subscribers canceled their subscriptions in protest against my comments.

  I felt it too. I sat on the floor of my study late that night with my back against a bookcase, staring vacantly into space. I’d had dinner at the Hotel Kong Frederik with an old friend and colleague from my Moscow days who was in Denmark to cover the Cartoon Crisis. I had been on the phone with a couple of colleagues and, exhausted, I was thinking over the whole surreal scenario. The world had gone mad on account of 12 cartoons. I felt tears well up and run down my cheeks, a spontaneous physical reaction to accumulated stress. For weeks, I had faced, and rejected, claims that the paper and I were responsible for the deaths of innocent people; that we were vicious Muslim haters; that we had planned all that as a provocation. For months, I’d heard the most incredible comments from people I had never met and who had no idea of what I or the paper stood for. I had ignored all of it, or tried to repudiate it with facts and logical argument. But now, a new situation had arisen in which I could only give my critics the benefit of being right: I had done something stupid.

  I had spent the morning at home writing a column for the paper. It was about lies and their significance, and it was inspired by a piece I’d read in the New York Times Magazine. From there, I went to the studios of Danish channel TV2 to be interviewed on CNN’s American Morning. I’d been invited to comment on charges put forward by media and critics that Jyllands-Posten was concealing an anti-Muslim agenda. A story had appeared in the Guardian about an editor of Jyllands-Posten’s Sunday edition refusing to publish satirical drawings of Jesus offered to the paper by a freelancer in 2003.28

  “I don’t think the readers of Jyllands-Posten will find the drawings funny. In fact, I think they would probably raise an outcry. For that reason, I won’t be publishing them,” the editor had apparently said in his reply to the artist in question.

  Thus, Jyllands-Posten was accused of a hypocritical double standard. Actually, the two in
stances differed significantly. First, as the editor in question explained, the drawings had been of poor quality; he had made the mistake of not telling the artist that directly and instead rejected his work with reference to the possible offense it might cause to the paper’s readership, which was really only a polite excuse. Second, like other papers, Jyllands-Posten receives submissions every day from freelancers wanting us to publish articles, illustrations, and cartoons. Third, the Muhammad cartoons were commissioned as part of a journalistic project that had been devised by the editorial board.

  But such subtleties tend to fall by the wayside. So when I heard that the editors of our Sunday edition were planning to run a full page of satirical drawings the paper had published over the years—drawings that made fun of both Christians and Jews—I printed three of the drawings and took them with me to the TV2 studios. All three were by Kurt Westergaard, the man behind the cartoon of Muhammad with the bomb in his turban. One depicted Jesus on the cross with dollar signs in his eyes; another showed the Star of David with a bomb attached; a third depicted an undernourished Palestinian caught up in a barbed-wire fence in the shape of the Star of David.

  When CNN asked me why the paper had rejected caricatures of Jesus, I explained that the Muhammad drawings issued from a news story about self-censorship in dealing with Islam, and, holding up Westergaard’s drawings, I added, “These cartoons might also be offensive to Christians and Jews, and they were done by the same artist who did the cartoon of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban. My point is that we’re not specifically trying to offend Muslims any more than anyone else.”

  That part of the interview was fairly uncontroversial when it ran on CNN, but on the Danish TV2 news program that evening, it was a bombshell. The impression was given that the drawings I was holding up were new, commissioned by Jyllands-Posten as part of the current controversy, rather than archive material the paper was printing in order to refute claims that it was pursuing an anti-Muslim vendetta. In other words, not only had we more or less deliberately offended the world’s Muslims; we were now planning to repeat the stunt by targeting Christians and Jews.

  I didn’t watch the news that night; I was being interviewed by the American TV channel ABC. But I did notice that my phone was suddenly ringing nonstop. There were already more than a hundred messages on my answering machine from the media wanting comments.

  I had also made another mistake in that CNN interview. At the time, an Iranian government newspaper had responded to the Cartoon Crisis by requesting cartoons about the Holocaust, to see whether the West would uphold the principles of free speech regarding the Nazi genocide to the same standard as it did regarding the Prophet Mohammad. The studio anchor asked me to comment, and I answered, “I can tell you that my newspaper is trying to establish a contact with that Iranian newspaper, and we would run these cartoons the same day as they would publish them.”29

  My mistake was not saying that Jyllands-Posten would run Holocaust cartoons, because in actual fact it had already done so only four days previously. On Saturday, February 4, 2006, we had carried a full page containing 13 examples of anti-Semitic cartoons from the Arab press. We didn’t think they were funny or appropriate, or in any way comparable to religious satire, but with so many in the Muslim world in an uproar about the Muhammad cartoons, we found it relevant to show examples of satire from the Arab press so our readers could judge for themselves. Publishing something is not the same as supporting it. So we ran a cartoon from the Jordanian paper Ad-Dustur showing Auschwitz; instead of a swastika, the Israeli flag waved from a watchtower, accompanied by the words “Gaza Strip or Israeli death camp?” A second drawing, from Arab News in Saudi Arabia, depicted Israeli premier Ariel Sharon hacking children to pieces with a swastika-shaped axe. A third, taken from Al-Watan in Oman, showed a Jew with a swastika on his back, thrusting a Star of David sword into a bleeding Palestinian. A brief editorial comment stated:

  Unambiguously anti-Semitic drawings are not nearly as frequent in Arab newspapers as they were only a few years ago. However, they are far from rare. Since both Moses and Jesus are considered by Muslims to be prophets, and thus above criticism, caricatures portraying these two figures never occur. By contrast, anti-Jewish—and occasionally anti-Christian—cartoons are often published. Many Muslims claim that Jyllands-Posten “would never dare publish drawings of an anti-Semitic nature.” They may now consider it done.30

  So it wasn’t the Iranian Holocaust cartoons as such that were the problem, although Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste distanced himself from my comments. But CNN squeezed the story into a news brief that made it appear that I had announced that Jyllands-Posten would be working together with the Iranian government newspaper to sponsor the Holocaust competition—not what I had said at all. My mistake was making CNN’s viewers privy to an editorial process that at that point in time was nobody’s business but the paper’s editors’.

  It was clear that I was doing too many interviews. I faced a tsunami of requests for them, and it is hard for a journalist to turn another journalist down. Some, however, were bizarre. On January 29, 2006, I had taken part in a program on Al Jazeera. Denied the chance of speaking to the studio anchor beforehand, I was completely in the dark about the context in which I was to appear. All of a sudden, I was live from a studio in Copenhagen. The first thing I did was to express regret that anyone should feel offended by the drawings. I stressed that we had not set out to do so, and that scathingly satirical cartoons were a common feature of Danish newspapers. None of those comments, however, were translated into Arabic. Translation began only when I explained why Jyllands-Posten would not apologize for the drawings, and why every paper should have the right to publish drawings that could be construed as offensive. So my comments appeared far more confrontational than I had intended.

  A few days later, I took part in a Norwegian satirical program, shaking a tambourine while the host played the guitar and sang. Then, late one Friday evening, one of the major Arab TV stations called on me at my office. The interview itself took only five minutes, but the reporter and his female assistant spent half an hour lecturing me about the indefensibility of what Jyllands-Posten had done. They told me how they loved their Prophet more than their own children and spouses, and that I—and the newspaper, therefore—had committed the worst form of sacrilege. For my part, I countered by saying that their statement reminded me of the Stalin era, when ordinary Soviet citizens were brainwashed into putting Stalin and the Soviet state before anything else. Those who professed to love a religious symbol more than their closest family could be talked into committing atrocities against children, spouses, and parents in the name of their faith. In my view, it was perverse.

  I told them the story of the Russian teenager Pavlik Morozov, who according to Soviet propaganda had informed against his father in 1931 for opposing Stalin’s policies of enforced collectivization. Testifying in court, the boy condemned his father’s crime, whereupon the following exchange occurred: “But this is me, your father,” exclaimed Trofim Morozov. His son turned to the judge and replied: “Indeed, he was once my father, but I no longer consider him as such. I act not as a son, but as a communist.” Pavlik Morozov was hailed as a hero and an example to all Soviet children, celebrated in books and music. Statues of the boy were erected, and plays were performed, turning the unselfish child who had sacrificed his own father to the cause into his own cult. The moral of the story was that children should love the Communist Party and Stalin more than their own parents. It was twisted, yet it heavily affected a whole generation of Soviet children.

  The two Egyptians shook their heads in impatient exasperation as I related the tale. The atmosphere between us was hardly one of cross-cultural understanding, but the hour was late, and we were tired.

  Four months in the spotlight, and now a couple of inglorious errors of judgment, meant that I was relieved to step out of the public eye. I was burned out and decided to take a vacation.

  What made me do all th
ose interviews anyway?

  I felt there had been sound journalistic reasons for publishing the Muhammad cartoons. Perhaps naively, I thought that reasoned argument would eventually put things in their proper perspective. And occasionally, I did feel it made a difference. Not all those efforts were in vain.

  Also, it was in a sense exciting. Being the focus of such enormous exposure was a challenge of a magnitude that I had never before encountered. The paper was under fire, and I felt I was fighting for what I believed in, like a gladiator, cheered on or booed by the crowd.

  I learned a lot from the experience, about the media and about myself. It was by no means easy to acknowledge that I had fallen foul of the kind of narcissism I so deplored in celebrities who are hungry for TV exposure and a fast ride to riches and fame. I could sense the rush of being the center of attention, but I refused to admit that it played a part in why I was so eager to appear in the media around the globe. How beguiling it is when the most influential media in the world queued up to talk to you.

  But it was also an overwhelming experience. Part of me was scared and overwhelmed by all that was happening around me; throughout, I had a clear sense of being up against forces within myself that I had difficulty controlling. The taste was at once sweet and bitterly unpleasant. It seemed like the kind of thing I imagined compulsive gamblers, pyromaniacs, and serially unfaithful partners experience: allowing themselves to be seduced by their own vanity, physical urges, and a desire for excitement. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they are unable to resist the temptation.

  7. Aftershock II