The Tyranny of Silence Read online

  This observation clearly applies to the Muhammad cartoons, since those who felt offended by the images and wanted them banned and destroyed were instrumental in their being spread throughout the world.

  In Mitchell’s view, images in themselves say nothing. Only we make them come alive, reading meaning into them, becoming angry because of them, or finding joy. Their message is defined by the beholder and whatever context he or she cares to construct. The claim is supported by the fact that offensive images are notoriously unstable artifacts.29 Images that a hundred years ago were considered pornographic, disgusting, or blasphemous may in our day be deemed to be great works of art: think of two of French impressionist Édouard Manet’s most prominent works, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and Olympia, both slammed as vulgar and immoral when first exhibited in Paris.30

  Thus, it is not Kurt Westergaard’s depiction of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban that stirs up feeling, but the beholder’s verbalization of what he or she sees. In some instances, that verbalization happens to be “Muhammad is a terrorist” or “All Muslims are terrorists”—regardless of the fact that it was not Westergaard’s intention to draw such an image, and despite closer analysis of the image revealing that it appears to provide no immediate basis for such an interpretation.

  Is art entitled to be transgressive?31 Is it a privileged zone in which the individual has the right to say things not normally tolerated, and is Westergaard’s cartoon art? The argument is sometimes deployed to distinguish between Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Muhammad cartoons: Rushdie’s novel is a work of art, whereas the cartoons are vulgar doodles devoid of aesthetic value. But is art somehow special? Some people highlight art’s ability to express messages and impressions differently, to transgress borders and break down taboos, allowing audiences to see, experience, and understand the familiar reality of the world in new ways, thereby paving the way for new insight. Art’s “estrangement” ability serves to break the automatic, routine experience of reality and is therefore particularly valuable.

  Another line of defense of art’s right to offend rests on the so-called canonic alibi, claiming that transgressive art is part of a tradition and should be understood in light of references to previous works.

  That view is relevant to the Muhammad debate insofar as it makes clear that the cartoons were partly created in a context in which the breaking of taboos is considered to be progressive rather than intended to offend or attack a religious minority. Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano were a source of uproar in the United States in 1989, triggering reactions that bring to mind those following the Muhammad cartoons. The difference, however, is that whereas criticism of Mapplethorpe and Serrano issued mostly from the Christian right, the attacks on the Muhammad cartoons primarily came from the progressive left.

  In 1989, the American art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s sensational exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment was removed from the program of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art three weeks before it was due to open.32 The gallery feared that its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts would be withdrawn because of the homosexual and sadomasochistic subjects of Mapplethorpe’s work. The Corcoran’s self-censorship occurred in the shadow of another scandal that took place in 1989, when conservative members of Congress, launching a campaign against public funding of offensive art, took issue with Piss Christ, an image by Haitian-Cuban photographer Andres Serrano.33 Piss Christ showed a plastic crucifix immersed in urine, and one gallery where it was shown had secured public funding for its exhibition; Serrano himself had received $15,000 for his work.

  The ensuing debate again illustrated that opinions about what can be deemed offensive differ greatly. Interest in Serrano’s work (and its market value) skyrocketed. One Catholic nun defended Piss Christ on theological grounds: she believed it highlighted the way modern society regards Christ and the Gospels.

  In 1999, an exhibition titled Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection opened at London’s Royal Academy and the Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art in New York. One image, by Marcus Harvey, showed child murderer Myra Hindley. The mother of one of Hindley’s victims demanded the work be removed because it offended her, and Hindley herself wrote to the gallery from her prison cell, asking that it be removed because it would cause grief both to the families of the children she had murdered and to those suffering as a result of similar crimes. The work remained on exhibition; the gallery suffered several smashed windows.

  In New York, the Hindley piece went largely unnoticed.34 But another of the 110 works on exhibition created a media storm. Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary depicted the Virgin Mary as a black Madonna adorned with resin-covered lumps of elephant dung and surrounded by images of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines.35 New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who like the artist himself was a Catholic, threatened to cut off the city’s $7 million annual support to the museum unless the work was removed. Every politician in New York appeared to feel the need to take a stand.

  Ofili himself believed the aggressive reactions had little to do with his work, but were fired by political agendas. In an interview, he explained that the elephant dung was a reference to his African heritage. The elephant and its excrement were symbols of power and fertility. African art had a long tradition of using dung expressively, and as such, there was nothing at all offensive about it.

  “There’s something incredibly simple but incredibly basic about it. It attracts a multitude of meanings and interpretations,” Ofili said to the New York Times. “I don’t feel as though I have to defend it. The people who are attacking this painting are attacking their own interpretation, not mine. You never know what’s going to offend people,” he added.

  No one had predicted that Harvey’s and Ofili’s works specifically would become objects of outrage. Some considered Damien Hirst’s This Little Piggy Went to Market, consisting of a dead pig in formaldehyde, to be the work most likely to cause affront and had anticipated the wrath of animal rights activists, but as it turned out, it got few reactions.36 Moreover, the exhibition revealed that even in countries rooted in the same culture, opinions as to what is offensive can differ markedly. The intentions of the artist were not determinative of what a specific work communicated, and—as Ofili pointed out—it was not the image itself that caused offense, but the critics’ (and not the artist’s) interpretation of it.

  For W. J. T. Mitchell, it is often the language we use to represent an image that defines whether or not it is considered offensive. People who have never laid eyes on Ofili’s image of the Virgin Mary, but have heard it referred to as Madonna with Elephant Dung, classify it as offensive, although in reality the piece, according to Mitchell, appears quite harmless: unobtrusive, gentle, and innocent. The noun “dung” provokes the offense and gives rise to the conclusion that the painting is disrespectful. As with Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, the title of the work establishes a mental context, and that, rather than its actual properties, is the true source of offense. If Serrano had called his work Christ Bathed in Light, most likely it would not have attracted the kind of attention it did.

  From all these cases—Manet, Ofili, Serrano, Mapplethorpe, and many others—we see that the propensity of an image to cause offense is not a fixed characteristic. It emerges socially out of the interaction between individuals, institutions, and events past and present. And different images do not cause offense in the same way. Some offend the beholder; some offend the person depicted. Some images offend because they pour scorn on something people perceive as valuable, others because they glorify something people think of as contemptible. Thus, the glorification of Muhammad among Muslims may be perceived as offensive to those whose kin have been killed in Muhammad’s name. That was clearly the sentiment of Maria Gomez after her husband had been killed in the Madrid bombings of 2004 by terrorists in the name of Islam.

  Mitchell does not believe in using legis
lation to curtail offensive images in the broad sense, only in contexts in which people are forced to look at images they would otherwise choose not to see. Citizens, he says, have the right not to have offensive images thrown up in their face, while they simultaneously have the right to see images that others find offensive. The right to show offensive images is therefore above all a matter of context rather than content, of the setting in which an image appears rather than what it shows: basically, it’s about where, when, and to whom.37

  Opening my email on the morning of September 30, 2005, I read the first reactions to the cartoons. With one exception, they were positive.

  “Thanks for a superb initiative printing the Face of Muhammad in JP today,” one reader wrote. “Features of this nature make us appreciate our newspaper even more than we did before. The piece illustrates what satire really can do. Many of the cartoons were so funny they had me laughing out loud, without their in any way presenting a negative picture of Islam.”

  Another commented: “Not used to writing in—but my word, these cartoons are brilliant! Moving, incisive, hilarious! Looking forward to reactions the next few days, they will come, surely! Fantastic.”

  Then one mildly negative reaction, from a Muslim: “Don’t play with religion. In Denmark there is room for all of us. We live in Denmark, so we should accept Danish rules. We need to hear and write about the positive sides of our lives.”

  During the course of the day, I also received a phone call from a store owner in Brøndby, west of Copenhagen. He criticized the cartoons and informed me that they had been the subject of discussion at his mosque, with widespread support for a boycott of Jyllands-Posten. I explained to him our reason for publishing the cartoons, and that I felt they in no way overstepped the generally accepted approach to satire in Denmark. I pointed out that my article on the same page emphasized that Muslims should receive the same treatment as Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and other believers and nonbelievers. By putting Islam on the same footing as other faiths, the cartoons integrated Muslims into a Danish satirical tradition, since we were thereby considering them as equals in the society rather than outsiders. They were inclusive rather than exclusive of the Muslim community in Denmark. During the months that followed, I reiterated that argument in media all over the world, as well as in public discussions, to the extent that eventually I could reel it off in my sleep, like the chorus of some pop song.

  On the afternoon of September 30, 2005, I went out into the city to meet with an old friend from Washington, D.C., who happened to be visiting Copenhagen. We sat at a sidewalk café on Kongens Nytorv enjoying the autumn sun. I mentioned in passing that we had just published some cartoons that had given rise to a few reactions from readers. We carried on chatting about Danish domestic policy and what was going on in the United States and Russia, a passion shared by us both. At that point, I was more interested in what stories were going to run in the days that followed than what had been in the paper that morning. I had no idea what the coming months and years had in store.

  4. The Infamous Ability of Humans to Adapt

  According to the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET), Kurt Westergaard was to be murdered in his home on a quiet residential street in a suburb of Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city.

  “I imagine it was going to be with something from the kitchen drawer,” said Kurt Westergaard drily. “It wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, I’m sure.”1

  He looked like what he was: a hippie grandfather in a black-velvet jacket, a red scarf, turquoise socks, red-checked shirt, and sneakers. Having spent eight months in hiding, he and his wife Gitte were back home in their tidy row house in Viby, Jutland. It was a November evening in 2007, and they were sitting outside on the patio under the eaves that Gitte had just finished fixing when PET called. A group of radical Muslims were planning to assassinate her husband. The group had blueprints of the house and had been watching it for some time. The couple was given a few hours to pack before being whisked off to safe houses—a series of holiday cabins, hotels, and apartments.

  By now, Kurt was convinced he would be living with police protection for the rest of his life. He was 73 years old: “Too old to be scared,” he commented. PET had turned the house into a small fortress. There were closed-circuit television cameras everywhere; the windows were bulletproof; and a safe room had been installed, with an alarm that, if activated, would bring police help within two minutes.

  The safe room probably saved Kurt Westergaard’s life on New Year’s Day in 2010, when an attempt was made on his life. A 28-year-old man of Somali origin forced entry into the artist’s home at around 10:00 p.m., while Westergaard and his 5-year-old granddaughter were home alone. The girl’s parents had gone to a movie, and Gitte was holidaying abroad. Westergaard and the child, whose leg was in a cast following a recent accident, had been watching The Wizard of Oz and reading a book. Suddenly, all hell broke loose.

  “I’d just been to the bathroom and was on my way back into the living room when there was a series of tremendous blows against the glass door leading into the garden,” Westergaard recalled when I visited him again in the spring of 2010. By now, security had been further tightened, and guards were permanently staked out in a container unit put up alongside the house.

  According to PET, Westergaard’s attacker and potential assassin was linked to the al Shabaab terror movement in Somalia.2 He had arrived in Aarhus by train from Copenhagen that same evening. From the train station, he had taken a taxi to Westergaard’s home and had asked to be dropped off at the end of the road. The driver later recalled his customer saying that he had been there before and could find his own way. He crossed a public lawn, went around to the back of the house, and climbed over the gate. He carried a bag containing an axe and a knife. He used the axe to smash his way into the living room where Westergaard’s grandchild was lying on the sofa with her broken leg. Westergaard himself retreated to the safe room—the bathroom from where he had just come.

  “I had to make a quick decision,” Westgaard recalled. Should I confront him and risk being killed in front of my grandchild? Or should I go back into the safe room and hit the police alarm? I chose the latter,” he explained, “remembering that PET had told us that those kinds of terrorists only go for whomever they think has offended Islam, leaving their families alone. Fortunately, it turned out to be true, but I was very, very scared.”

  His axe-wielding would-be assassin launched himself at the door of the bathroom, chopping wildly and screaming: “I’m going to kill you!” and “Revenge.” Then, as the flashing blue lights of police vehicles appeared in the street outside, he turned and took flight with the words, “I’ll be back.” At first, Westergaard thought others must involved, so violent was the commotion. On his way out, the attacker smashed a television and a computer. Westergaard’s grandchild had begun screaming when the attacker forced his way inside. Now, Westergaard assured her that she needn’t be frightened. Confronted by police on the street outside, Westergaard’s attacker hurled his axe at an officer and started waving his knife. Police responded by shooting him in his right leg and left hand; they then overpowered and arrested him. He was charged with attempted murder and terrorism.

  The artist was among the country’s most likely targets for a terrorist attack, and he had been under PET protection for two years. Yet a man who was under surveillance on suspicion of being involved in a terrorist network had succeeded in gaining entry to his home and carrying out an attempt on his life. Westergaard and his wife declined to go into hiding again; they resigned themselves to a life in which they would be shadowed by armed police wherever they went. However, the attack so alarmed Westergaard’s hairdresser that she refused to cut his hair. Out of concern for the safety of its staff, a major auction house declined to sell a watercolor Westergaard had painted to support Haitian earthquake victims. Not wishing to be the cause of undue concern among his colleagues, Westergaard decided to resign his freelance position at Jyll
ands-Posten in the summer of 2010.

  Even the first evening I spoke with Westergaard and his wife, two years before that attack, they told me that Gitte had been asked to stay away from her job at a local kindergarten on the grounds that her presence compromised the safety of the staff and children. Kurt had been informed by the Hotel Radisson in Aarhus that they no longer wished him to stay there: guests had begun to recognize him, and he was bad for business.

  When PET made that first phone call in November 2007, Westergaard knew that his life was about to change drastically. Only close family were informed about their situation. PET wanted to give the impression that the couple was still living in the house so any potential attackers could be apprehended if and when they should strike. The mailbox was emptied regularly. The lights in the house turned on and off automatically, and surveillance equipment was installed. The couple had to leave their car behind, which was parked outside the house and moved every so often.

  The Westergaards celebrated Gitte’s birthday as usual on December 14, 2007, coming home the day before to decorate the house for Christmas; they even put up and trimmed a tree. Fifty guests were invited, and Gitte served a buffet of traditional Christmas fare accompanied by wine, beer, and schnapps. No one noticed anything was amiss. Armed intelligence agents were staked out in a shed in the back garden and kept a sharp eye on proceedings with a camera mounted in a birdhouse.

  “Afterward, we took everything down again, stayed the night in the house, and moved back out to our secret hideaway on the coast the next day,” Gitte Westergaard recalled.

  To begin with, it was all very Hollywood. Kurt Westergaard remembers how one agent, who drove them to their first hideaway, reminded him of Al Pacino in the movie Serpico. They drove a circuitous route, throwing out red herrings along the way, and generally acted like they do in the movies. As time progressed, however, and no solution to their plight ensued, the mood sank. The sense of not being in control of one’s life became a source of distress.