The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  The only answer you can give from my side of the table is that everyone has a right to tell their story in any way they wish. This goes back to the question of what sort of society we want. If you wish to live in an open society, it follows that people will talk about things in different ways, and some of them will cause offense and anger. The answer to that is matter-of-fact: OK, you don’t like it, but there are lots of things I don’t like either. That’s the price for living in an open society. From the moment you begin to talk about limiting and controlling certain expressions, you step into a world where freedom no longer reigns, and from that moment on, you are only discussing what level of un-freedom you want to accept. You have already accepted the principle of not being free.

  Rushdie’s words came just at the right time for me. They opened my eyes and helped me define my own project. We all are entitled to tell whatever story we wish about the Muhammad cartoons. Thus, this book doesn’t attempt to cover every aspect of what happened. I am fully aware that other versions exist that are no less true than my own; in some cases, they may be even more complete. I am simply recounting the events as I experienced them and other stories that I deem to be relevant to that experience. My personal quest is to create coherence and meaning out of events that have taken up a lot of room in my own life and in the lives of many others since September 2005.

  So this book is also about my own values, about things that are significant to me—books I have read, countries I have visited. It tries to position individual experience within the wider perspective, to explore the relation between my own story and the Cartoon Crisis as a series of events played out on a global scene. In the space between the big picture and the small lies the answer to my own conflict—the image I have of myself as a person who is not fond of conflict—against the wider, global view of me as a dangerous and irresponsible troublemaker. So I also look back to the historical forces that have shaped my attitudes, to European history and its sweeping debates on issues such as faith and doubt, knowledge and ignorance, which have shaped the very notion of tolerance.

  My experiences have confirmed my basic belief that people have a lot more in common than whatever divides them. Apparent differences of culture, religion, and history are significant factors, but they are by no means constant; they change, however slowly. Think of countries such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, South Korea, Chile, and South Africa: until only a few decades ago, brutal authoritarian and oppressive regimes; now open, constitutional societies. Such examples show that we should be hesitant about writing off any culture as innately incompatible with liberty and democracy.6

  Current discussion concerning Islam and Muslims reminds me of the debate about communism and the Soviet Russians during the Cold War. At the time, it was often said that whereas we in the West emphasized freedom and the rights of the citizen, in Eastern Europe, more weight was attached to social rights—the right to work, to housing, and to free health care and education. That distinction was put forth as intrinsically cultural; thus, criticism of the Soviet Bloc for civil rights violations was an expression of Western imperialism. I watched a parallel sentiment emerge in the wake of the Cartoon Crisis: a willingness to compromise what we in the West consider fundamental rights because of supposedly intractable “cultural differences.”

  My impression was that my friends and acquaintances in Soviet Russia wanted the kind of constitutional freedom and equality encompassed in the notion of universal human rights. But many scholars in the West accepted the premise that Russians were fundamentally different from people in the West; therefore, on the issue of the way it treated its citizens, the Soviet regime could not be judged by Western standards. That notion explains why they were completely unable to foresee the collapse of the regime after popular revolt: to justify their dubious premise, those scholars were compelled to marginalize the Soviet human rights movement and other dissident groups. They claimed that such groups were just manipulated by the West as part of a global political maneuver.

  Exactly the same is claimed now about human rights activists and critics of Islam in the Muslim world. It’s true that real incompatibilities and disparities of culture between the Islamic world and Europe played out during the conflict.

  The truth, however, is that the jury is out as long as the population is prevented from speaking freely and without fear of reprisal. Freethinking forces exist in the Islamic world, insisting on free religious exercise and freedom of speech. That was confirmed during the uprisings throughout the Arab world in 2011.

  While the Cartoon Crisis raged, a number of newspaper and magazine editors were arrested, and their offices were closed down because they had printed the cartoons—because, although they may have found them distasteful, they believed their readers should have the chance to make up their own minds about the now-notorious drawings. One of those people, Jihad Momani, editor-in-chief of the Jordanian weekly Shihan, wrote the following with reference to a terrorist attack on three hotels in Amman in November 2005: “Muslims of the world, be sensible. . . . What is more damaging to Islam? These cartoons, images of a hostage-taker cutting the throat of his victim in front of a camera, or a suicide bomber blowing himself up at a wedding in Amman?”

  I note, too, that large parts of the Iranian population rejected an Islamic take on “constitutional rights” put forward in elections in 2009, and many Iranians in the West were actively supportive of Jyllands-Posten during the Cartoon Crisis. They knew from experience what was at stake if censorship of religious satire and criticism should be accepted.

  The Cartoon Crisis provides insight into the kind of world that lies ahead in the 21st century. It was a crisis about how to coexist in a world in which old boundaries have crumbled. Today, societies everywhere are becoming more multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious. And for the first time in history, a majority of the world’s population now inhabits urban areas. Increasingly, we live side by side with people who are different from ourselves. The risk of stepping on someone’s toes, of saying or doing something that exceeds someone’s bounds, is steadily increasing. Moreover, advances in communications technologies have meant that events even in the remotest regions of the world are no longer perceived as being distant. All notion of context disappears. Everything that appears on the Internet appears everywhere. For humor and satire in particular, the loss of context opens the door to myriad possible misunderstandings and sources of offense.

  Thus, in 2006, the Iranian authorities demanded an apology for a satirical drawing in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel showing four Iranian soccer players strapped up with bombs and being watched by German soldiers. The accompanying text read, “The German army should definitely be deployed during the World Cup.”7 The joke was aimed at German politicians who wanted armed forces to patrol the tournament that was taking place in Germany. But the Iranian religious leadership saw things differently. Molotov cocktails were thrown at the German embassy in Tehran, while the artist responsible for the work was forced into hiding because of death threats. Another German paper once printed a cartoon poking fun at the private parts of the heir to the Japanese throne—unthinkable in Japan, where the royal family is almost religiously revered.

  Comedians are often keenly aware of the fine line between dangerous and harmless provocation. During a live television show in 2006, Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen set fire to the Old Testament in the town of Ålesund, a strong bastion of Christian sentiment. Later, when asked to repeat the stunt with a copy of the Koran, Jespersen declined, joking that he would prefer to live longer than another week. It seemed that Christianity was being treated preferentially. Or was it Islam? In any case, the Norwegian prime minister leveled no criticism of the public burning of Christianity’s holy book—which is fine by me, but why then did he find it so necessary to condemn a small Norwegian newspaper when it reprinted the Muhammad cartoons?

  I believe I know the answer to that. But back in September 2005, I certainly did not, which is one of the reasons
why Jyllands-Posten and I decided to draw attention to the issue of self-censorship in the public debate on Islam in the first place.

  If we believe in equality, it seems there are two available responses to threats against freedom of speech. One option is, basically, “If you accept my taboos, I’ll accept yours.” If one group wants protection against insult, then all groups should be so protected. If denying the Holocaust or the crimes of communism is against the law, then publishing cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet should also be forbidden. But that option can quickly spiral out of control: before we know it, hardly anything may be said.

  The second option is to say that in a democracy, there is no “right not to be offended.” Since we are all different, the challenge is then to formulate minimum constraints on freedom of speech that will allow us to coexist in peace. A society comprising many different cultures should have greater freedom of expression than a society that is significantly more homogenous. That premise seems obvious to me, yet the opposite conviction is widely held, and that is where the tyranny of silence lurks. At present, the tendency in Europe is to deal with increasing diversity by constraining freedom of speech, whereas the United States maintains a long tradition of leading off in the other direction. Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, many European countries have outlawed Holocaust denial, for example, and it appears that the United States will increasingly stand alone with its tradition of upholding near-absolute freedom of expression on that issue.

  My personal view is that the Americans are right. Freedom and tolerance are, to me, two sides of the same coin, and both are under pressure. As noted earlier, the world is undergoing rapid change. Taking offense has never been easier, or indeed more popular: many have developed sensitivity so exquisite that it has become excessive.

  It almost tempts one to ask Europe’s welfare states to spend some money, not on “sensitivity training”—learning what not to say—but on insensitivity training: learning how to tolerate. For if freedom and tolerance are to have a chance of surviving in the new world, we all need to develop thicker skin.

  Certain regimes, including Russia, China, some former Soviet republics, and numerous Islamic governments, agitate in the United Nations and other international forums for laws banning offensive speech. Perversely, although such laws are often put forward in the name of minorities, in practice, they are used to silence critics and persecute minorities. Unfortunately, such petitions have traction in the international community. Their proponents are prepared to sacrifice diversity of expression in the name of respecting diversity of culture, a contradiction they clearly fail to perceive.

  They feel they will further social harmony by maintaining a delicate balance between tolerance and freedom of speech—as though the two were opposites.

  But tolerance and freedom of speech reinforce each other. Free speech makes sense only in a society that exercises great tolerance of those with whom it disagrees. Historically, tolerance and freedom of speech are each other’s prerequisites rather than opposites. In a liberal democracy, the two must be tightly intertwined.

  This book comprises nine additional chapters. Three of them consist largely of interviews with individuals who in one way or another have been close to the Cartoon Crisis, and who here shed light on some of its most significant aspects. The first is a Spanish woman whose husband was killed in the Madrid terrorist attack in March 2004, and who later appeared at the trial of the perpetrators wearing a T-shirt showing Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Next, I speak with Westergaard himself about his upbringing, his background, and his work, in the light of Denmark’s history of free speech and censorship. I include an interview that took place in a detention center south of Copenhagen with Karim Sørensen, a young Tunisian who in February 2008 was apprehended by Danish police on suspicion of planning to assassinate Kurt Westergaard. As Muslims, Karim Sørensen and two of his associates felt offended by Westergaard’s depiction of the Prophet.

  I interweave my own version of the Cartoon Crisis and events before and after publication of the drawings in September 2005 with the story of some of the constraints that have been imposed on freedom of speech. I take a look at efforts today to reestablish so-called violation codes: blasphemy legislation, laws against the incitement of hatred and discrimination, and laws criminalizing the denial or trivialization of genocide or specific historic events.

  I look at my encounters with Russian dissidents in the Soviet Union. In my view, the history of Russian dissidence is highly relevant to the Cartoon Crisis—even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the Cold War long ago ended—because I feel it mirrors the emergence of new dissident communities within Islam. Included are interviews I have conducted with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in New York, with Afshin Ellian in Leiden, and with Maryam Namazie in Cologne and London.

  What those critics say is by no means new: in many ways, there is nothing to add to the discourse on liberty and human rights. Nevertheless, their stories are of immense importance for Europe and the West in general, demonstrating that the desire for freedom is by no means exclusive to the West, and that individuals in other cultures run enormous risks to stand up for “Western” values of freedom and tolerance.

  In the book’s final chapter, I examine the global struggle for universal human rights. I tell the story of the heretic Michael Servetus, who was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553, triggering the first great debate in Europe on the issue of religious tolerance. It is a debate that I had thought was won, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the communist empire. I failed to see that Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to all the world’s Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie because of something he wrote in a novel was another major historical turning point. Today, it seems clear that the Rushdie affair was the first collision in a global conflict that seems likely to shape international relations in the 21st century. Nowhere are freedom and tolerance as deeply ingrained as in the West. That I endeavor to illustrate in the final chapter of the book with stories from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, and India, which outline how individuals and groups of individuals suffer violations of their right to free speech and free thought.

  Well-meaning people in the West claim that democracies can and should sacrifice a little free speech in the name of social harmony: those stories may lead them to reconsider. Measures ostensibly designed to protect religious symbols, doctrines, and rituals in order to prevent discrimination can lead to horrible persecution of the right to speak freely. That is one of the main reasons I continue to defend our right to publish the Muhammad cartoons. If I relinquish that right, I also indirectly accept the right of authoritarian regimes and totalitarian movements to limit free speech on grounds of violation of religion and religious sentiments. I find that unacceptable.

  2. Mass Murder and Satire

  I woke up this morning to an empty sky.

  —Bruce Springsteen

  It’s October 2007, and I’m sitting with Maria Gomez1 in the café of the Gran Hotel Canarias across from Madrid’s Prado Museum. She’s wearing jeans, a loose-fitting white blouse, and sunglasses to shade her eyes from the sharp glare of the afternoon sun. I order coffee with cold milk while Maria lights a cigarette. She seems restless. Tears well in her eyes as she recalls what happened three and a half years ago. During the course of our conversation, her mood swings from sorrow to anger, from dark humor to helplessness.

  Since the death of her husband in an explosion that ripped through a train on the outskirts Madrid in 2004, Gomez has been unable to work. A year ago, she and their baby daughter traveled to the island of Menorca to make a fresh start, while her first husband took care of their two sons. The vacation was a disaster; Maria fell into a depression. Her mother, to whom she feels especially close, developed cancer and is terminally ill. Maria’s only source of income is the tiny widow’s pension she receives from the state. All that and much more she reveals to me that warm autumn day, taking me back to March 11, 2004, a day sh
e and 46 million other Spaniards will never forget.

  It was a Thursday. As usual, Maria Gomez was up early. She prepared breakfast for her children. The modest little home in a sleepy suburb north of the city was quiet. No television or radio—at that time of day, Maria Gomez wasn’t interested in what was going on in the world outside. She loved the calm that filled her home in those early morning hours.

  Shortly after 7:00 a.m., Maria texted her 34-year-old husband Carlos, who had been working all night as a welder doing some construction work in a supermarket in Alcalá de Henares.

  “Good morning, my love, looking forward to you getting home,” she wrote.

  The supermarket remained open while the construction was under way, so Carlos had to work at night. It was his second night working there; the next day, he would move on to another job elsewhere.

  Maria’s phone rang. The display showed 7:41 a.m. It was Carlos.

  “I’m on the train; I’m exhausted,” he said.

  “How far are you?” Maria asked.

  “I’m at Santa Eugenia. I should be home in 30 minutes or so, 45 maybe.”

  Those were Carlos’s last words. Twelve hours later, his barely recognizable body was identified at a military hospital.

  In the meantime, Maria had convinced herself that her husband had survived the attack. All 10 explosions occurred before Carlos’s 7:41 a.m. phone call. Later, Maria learned that the clock on her phone was a few fateful minutes ahead. “I called him at 8:30 when he hadn’t come home. I wondered what could have happened. There was no answer, which was odd. I thought probably the train had been delayed or something.”

  Shortly after, Maria Gomez left to take the two boys, ages five and eight, to kindergarten and school. She sent another text message from the car: “What’s happening? Let me know.” Again, there was no answer. At her son’s school she heard about a train crash, but there were no details.