Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (42 page)

Western countries saw a wide range of reactions to the cartoon controversy on the part of both government officials and private editors. While a number of papers published the cartoons to make a point, and a few others did so in the interest of reporting the news, many refrained from doing so out of fear of causing offense, suffering violence, or both. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the drawings went largely unpublished even as they came to dominate the news cycles. Meanwhile, statements from government officials ranged from one minister actually urging papers to reprint the cartoons, to a head of state urging the prosecution of a paper that had done so. In general, the notion that freedom of expression was somehow distinct from the freedom to insult or offend appeared to gain considerable traction.

Beyond immediate responses to the twelve caricatures, the cartoon controversy has become part of a far-reaching international debate on the parameters of freedom of expression. International and private Islamic organizations have echoed the position of Muslim governments, contending that freedom of speech (for those who accept the concept at all) does not cover religious insults. As a spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood asserted, “We believe in free speech and a free press, but this does not give you the right to hurt me by hurting the prophet.”
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In Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, not only declared that the Muslim world would “demand a trial” over the cartoons but also called for an international ban on insults to Islam.
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This widely shared demand became a subject of contention between European institutions and Islamic organizations as they sought a resolution to the cartoon crisis.
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Although the most concentrated furor of riots, threats, and diplomacy in connection with the
Jyllands-Posten
cartoons occurred during February 2006, the aftermath of the crisis has continued. In the UN, the incident has had a lasting effect on the tone of ongoing debates over “Islamophobia” and freedom of speech. Related legal cases brought in by France, Canada, and Denmark took years to resolve; and threats and violence from Islamist terror groups against those involved in the cartoons’ production, and in some cases their conationals, have periodically resurfaced. Death threats against opposing voices continue to be heard.

In March 2006, Osama bin Laden declared that the cartoons were part of a “new Crusade” and warned of a response that would “make victorious our messenger of God.” He stated that the loss of life in European bombings “paled (in comparison) when you went overboard in your unbelief and freed yourselves of the etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of publishing these insulting drawings.” Bin Laden also called for a boycott on goods from the United States and from European countries that had backed Denmark, and punishment of “those responsible for this terrible crime, committed by a handful of crusader journalists and others who have fallen from the faith.” Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, declared that “the hatred of Western crusaders, directed at the honorable prophet Muhammad … forces us to make a risky decision: Are we prepared to sacrifice ourselves and everything we own in the way of God or not?” In May, Al-Qaeda operative Mohammed Hussain posted on the Web a video calling for Muslims to “avenge your prophet.” He announced, “We deeply desire that the small state of Denmark, Norway and France … are struck hard and destroyed … destroy their buildings, make their ground shake and transform them into a sea of blood.”
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That same month, Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir reported that twelve terrorists were traveling to Denmark to kill the cartoonists.
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Cartoon rage also apparently motivated one of three suspects arrested in August 2006 in connection with a plot to detonate bombs on German passenger trains, which failed only due to a problem with the detonators.
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In May 2007, prosecutors listed the caricatures, together with the presence of Danish troops in Iraq, among the motives behind a thwarted plot to detonate a bomb somewhere in Copenhagen, for which four men were subsequently convicted and sentenced to jail terms.
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In October 2007, a Danish convert to Islam, arrested with three others on terror charges, stated in court that his group had considered attacking Flemming Rose’s house with a remote-controlled car bomb.
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In September 2008, the U.S.-based security think tank Jamestown Foundation discovered plans to poison Denmark’s water supply in retaliation for the cartoons on an Al-Qaeda-linked website.
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In July 2008, an Islamist rebel leader was apprehended by government forces in Chad after a month of calling, according to Ahmat Mahamat Bachir, the country’s Security
Minister, for a “holy war against Christians and atheists” that “would be launched from Chad to as far as Denmark.”
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On February 12, 2008, Danish police arrested two Tunisians and a Danish man of Moroccan background in connection with a plot to assassinate Kurt Westergaard for drawing the turban-bomb cartoon.
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Danish intelligence later revealed that the two Tunisians had cased Westergaard’s home and learned his schedule. The younger of the pair, a martial arts expert, had planned to strangle the cartoonist.
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While the younger Tunisian left Denmark voluntarily in August 2008, the elder remained under a “tolerated stay” policy, according to which even foreign nationals who have committed a crime may remain in Denmark if they will likely face ill treatment upon return to their country of origin. The Danish Supreme Court ruled in November 2008 that the evidence against him was inadequate to keep him in custody.
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Westergaard, whose drawing was most often singled out by critics as an example of Danish infamy, had, at the time of the arrests, been in hiding since early 2006. In November 2007, when word of a plot to murder him first surfaced, he had to relocate to a well-protected hotel room. February 15, three days after the revelation of the plot’s details, he was evicted from the hotel for being “too much of a security risk.”
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Meanwhile,
Jyllands-Posten
editor Carsten Juste stated that his staff had “become more or less used to death threats and bomb threats since the cartoons, but it’s the first time that we’ve heard about actual murder plans.”
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On February 13, newspapers in Denmark, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands reprinted the offending cartoon in connection with their coverage of the arrests.
Berlingske Tidende
explained, “We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech.”
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In total, seventeen Danish papers that had originally declined to publish the cartoons now did so as a show of support for Westergaard;
Jyllands-Posten
, despite its previous apology, also reprinted them.
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Flemming Rose linked the cartoon controversy to the cases of those accused of blasphemy in the Muslim world and argued: “In the West, there is a lack of clarity on these issues. People suggest that Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen and Kurt Westergaard bear a certain amount of responsibility for their fate. They don’t understand that by doing so they tacitly endorse attacks on dissenting voices in parts of the world where no one can protect them.”
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Terrorists cited the republication of the cartoons as the motivation for a new spate of threats. In April 2008, Denmark evacuated the staff of its embassies in Algeria and Afghanistan as a result of threats linked to the February cartoon republication.
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On June 2, at least six Pakistanis died in an Al-Qaeda bombing of the Danish embassy in Islamabad, whose perpetrator said the act was retribution against Denmark’s “infidel government” for the cartoon republication, and warned of further attacks unless the Danish government apologized.
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In September 2008, Al-Qaeda released a video profiling the perpetrator of the attack and
reiterating its threat to strike against “the Crusader states which insult, mock and defame our prophet and the Koran in their media and occupy our lands, steal our treasure and kill our brothers.”
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In October 2009, two men living in Chicago were arrested for planning an attack on
Jyllands-Posten
’s offices in Denmark. (One of the conspirators told authorities he had suggested amending this plan and instead attempting to murder Flemming Rose and Kurt Westergaard.) The plot, code named the “Mickey Mouse Project,” was discovered by the FBI and the PET. David Headley, born as Daood Sayed Gilani, and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, American and Canadian citizens respectively, admitted to receiving training in Pakistan from Lakshar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group. While in Pakistan, Headley met with Al-Qaeda operative Ilyas Kashmiri to set his plan in motion. He also traveled to Denmark to scout for targets; officials discovered short videos of the
Jyllands-Posten
office and other potential targets in his checked luggage after arresting him at the Chicago airport.
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On January 1, 2010, a man linked to the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabab broke into Kurt Westergaard’s home with an axe and a knife. Westergaard, whose five-year-old granddaughter was also in the house, saved himself only by fleeing to a specially installed panic room in his house’s bathroom. While his attacker attempted to break down the door and shouted, according to Westergaard, about “blood” and “revenge,” the seventy-four-year-old cartoonist pressed a button to call police. Danish Intelligence later described the attack on Westergaard as likely “terror related.” Facing two counts of attempted homicide in a Danish court, the suspect denied the charges against him in court. An Al-Shabab spokesperson, however, praised the assault and urged “Muslims around the world to target the people” like Westergaard.
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The global campaign of outrage over
Jyllands-Posten
’s alleged blasphemy took a heavy toll. In addition to extensive destruction of property, scholar Jytte Klausen estimates that, by 2006, at least 241 people had died in related violence. Many deaths occurred in Nigeria, followed distantly by Afghanistan and Libya.
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It seems likely that much of the force of the crisis came from the intersection of institutionally amplified anticartoon rhetoric with existing conflicts and tensions.

Klausen, whose account of the crisis is often less than sympathetic to
Jyllands-Posten
and its project, concludes that, since the cartoon imbroglio, “New rules—formal and informal—apply that undoubtedly shrink the space for speech and artistic expression.”
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Her assessment proved uncannily accurate, as we discuss in
chapter 13
, when, in August 2009, Yale University Press, which had previously published at least four books containing images of Muhammad, refused to reproduce an image of the
Jyllands-Posten
issue containing the cartoons, along with other historic depictions of Muhammad, in a book chronicling the Danish cartoon affair—Klausen’s own book,
The Cartoons That Shook the World
.
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The Danish cartoons controversy might have appeared to some as a collision between religious and secular values, particularly given the Vatican’s support for Muslim protests against insulting their religion. However, the next major global crisis involving a purported Western insult to Islam proved that religious leaders themselves are far from immune to such charges. This furor originated in an academic lecture by Pope Benedict XVI, given at Regensburg, Germany, on September 12, 2006, on the relationship between faith and reason. While discussing the place of reason in the Christian tradition, the pope quoted from a dialogue between the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus II and a Muslim Persian, which at one point turned to the question of holy war:

The emperor … addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he says, “is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.”
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The pope’s primary purpose for the quotation was to elaborate on the emperor’s key claim that “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature,” the theme to which he devoted the remainder of the lecture. He described a Muslim teaching that “God is absolutely transcendent”—not bound to rationality or even, in the view of one Islamic theologian, to His own word. The pope then contrasted that view with what he described as the Catholic position, based on the synthesis of biblical faith and Greek philosophy, “that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy.” The bulk of the lecture focused on this heritage and the modern, mainly Western, challenges it faces. The pontiff called for faith joined with reason in the broad sense and contrasted this with either a positivist truncation of reason to exclude faith or a divorce between religion and rational inquiry.

However, many critics in the Muslim world quickly seized exclusively on Paleologus’s assertion that Muhammad had brought “evil and inhuman things.” In response, Vatican spokesmen emphasized that the pope had no wish to offend Muslims and hoped for respect and dialogue between faiths.
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This explanation failed to quell the outcry. Notably, a Muslim Brotherhood official, who warned that the pope’s remarks were likely to provoke “an extreme reaction,” went on to
explain that they “harm Islam more than the cartoons because they come from a leader who represents millions of people and not just from a journalist.”
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