Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (58 page)

There are other examples in the United States of censorship by threat of violence. The comedy cartoon show
South Park
declined to show an image of the Muslim prophet dressed in a bear suit, though it had mocked figures from other religions. In response, Molly Norris, a cartoonist for the
Seattle Weekly
, suggested that to counter such intimidation maybe there should be an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” She withdrew the suggestion and implied that she had been joking; but after she had received many death threats, including some from Al-Qaeda, the FBI advised her that she should go into hiding. She has given up her job, moved, and changed her name.
Seattle Weekly
’s chief editor, Mark Fefer, wrote that her cartoons would no longer be in the paper “because there is no more Molly.”
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On October 3, 2010, about 800 newspapers in the United States refused to run the “Non Sequitur” cartoon drawn for that day run by regular daily cartoonist Wiley Miller, and instead substituted another cartoon by Wiley. The cartoon that they refused to run contained no depiction of Muhammad, but merely a bucolic scene with the caption, “Where’s Muhammad?” The
Washington Post
said that it did not run the cartoon because it might upset Muslim readers and seem a “deliberate provocation.”
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Meanwhile, on October 20, 2010, Zachary Chesser, a young convert to Islam, pleaded guilty in Federal Court to supporting Somali terrorists and threatening the creators of
South Park
and was subsequently sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
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Several artists of Muslim background have also faced serious danger in the West. In January 2005, Rachid Ben Ali, a Dutch-Moroccan artist, was forced into hiding after his satirical work denouncing Islamist violence, exhibited by an Amsterdam art museum, drew death threats. His paintings, which depicted suicide bombers and “hate imams,” were featured in an exhibition that was opened with a powerful call by Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim politician in the Netherlands, to defend free expression.
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Iranian artist Sooreh Hera (a pseudonym) was the target of a fatwa published in Iranian newspapers. She received a number of death threats and could not attend an art festival featuring her own work. Safety concerns arose after she displayed photographs depicting gay Iranian exiles wearing masks and lewdly mimicking Muhammad and his son-in-law, the caliph Ali. In 2008, two invitations for Hera to exhibit were withdrawn for political reasons. An Amsterdam art festival finally agreed to exhibit her work, but with the stipulation that the most controversial pictures be omitted. The sponsoring gallery’s director had to obtain police protection due to threats.
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These controversies demonstrate that not all Muslims endorse the suppression of productions they view as offensive by fiat or threat. Also, most protests have been peaceful. Nonetheless, intimidation from extremists is quashing artists’ appetite for criticizing Islam. In November 2007, British artist Grayson Perry, who had previously not hesitated to target Christianity in his work, stated, “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.” Tim Marlow, exhibitions director at a London art gallery, said Perry had hit upon “something that’s there but very few people have explicitly admitted. Institutions, museums and galleries are probably doing most of the censorship.” In July 2008, playwright Simon Gray charged that National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner, who had drawn ire from Christians by staging
Jerry Springer: The Opera
, was nonetheless afraid of staging any shows that could be deemed offensive to Muslims. The director of the movie
2012
also admitted that fear prevented him from showing the destruction of Muslim symbols along with St. Peter’s Basilica and other religious sites in a scene depicting the end of the world.
⁴⁰

In 2002, Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by a non-Muslim offended by Fortuyn’s criticism of Islam. Although frequently described as a right-winger due to his concerns about Muslim immigration, Fortuyn was an openly gay former sociologist who feared that Muslim immigration would undermine the Netherlands’ liberal society, in part through crimes against gays and
the repression of women. He sought to restrict immigration and called Islam a “backward religion” but vehemently rejected any comparison between himself and figures such as French National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen. His party, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, rapidly gained ground in national polls until, on May 6, 2002, Fortuyn was murdered. He was shot repeatedly in a daytime assault by thirty-three-year-old Volkert van der Graaf. During the trial, the killer claimed that he had acted in order “to protect Muslims,” whom he claimed Fortuyn used as political “scapegoats.”
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Two prominent Dutch critics of Islam were forced into hiding after van Gogh’s slaying: Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders. Both, from different perspectives, are given to sweeping declarations that Islam threatens Western freedoms, and both have been bombarded with threats by radicals who seem determined to prove them right. Hirsi Ali, van Gogh’s collaborator on
Submission
, was an immigrant who embraced the liberties of her adopted homeland. The daughter of a Somali opposition leader, she lived in exile with her family in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and then Kenya, for a time falling under the influence of fundamentalists. In 1992, she found asylum in the Netherlands and took menial jobs while learning Dutch. She then became a translator for Dutch social workers working with immigrants, where she encountered abundant reports of domestic abuse. She enrolled at a university to study political science and in 2001 was hired by a Labor Party think tank. After 9/11, she called for an “Islamic Voltaire” and, in 2002, declared herself an atheist. She criticized Dutch multiculturalism and particularly urged the government to protect Muslim women from violence and to stop supporting Muslim organizations that practice gender segregation.

Before long, her father received messages from Somalis in Europe, warning that she would be killed if she continued. Radical Islamist websites also began posting death threats. She responded, “I’m talking from the inside … It’s seen as treason. I’m considered an apostate and that’s worse than an atheist.” After she said on Dutch national television that Islam could in some ways be considered a “backward religion,” the threats intensified. In 2002, she was forced to flee temporarily to the United States. In January 2003, Hirsi Ali became a member of the Dutch parliament for the free-market VVD party, where she concentrated on Muslim women’s issues, including better enforcement of laws against genital mutilation and “honor killings.” She hoped to “confront the European elite’s self-image as tolerant while under their noses women are living like slaves.” Critics called her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” and threats against her led Parliament to adopt new security measures.
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Shortly after the August 2004 showing of
Submission
, Hirsi Ali began living under around-the-clock protection. She spent six days in secret locations and then, told to leave the country for her own safety, briefly went again to the United
States.
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In January 2005, authorities uncovered a plot to kill her; nonetheless, she came out of hiding and, with bodyguards, returned to Parliament.
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That month, two rappers were convicted by a Dutch court for writing a song that spoke of wishing to break her neck. In March, after being kept in hotels and on a naval base for her own protection and with her suggestions for alternative housing repeatedly turned down by officials, she was provided with a safe house.
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She continued to raise integration issues, calling for drastic measures such as the closure of Muslim schools.
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During the peak of the Danish cartoons crisis in February 2006, she gave a lecture in Berlin, “The Right to Offend,” charging that many in Europe are afraid to criticize Islam. She decried the cynicism with which “evil governments like Saudi Arabia stage ‘grassroots’ movements to boycott Danish milk and yoghurt, while they would mercilessly crush a grassroots movement fighting for the right to vote.” She also criticized many Islamic teachings on the role of women, the execution of apostates and homosexuals, and punishments for theft and adultery, and she maintained that despite the many peaceful Muslims, it was “a hard-line Islamist movement” within Islam that threatened freedoms.

The Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, said he didn’t “have much use” for her comments, and, despite her atheist and feminist stances, she drew heavy criticism from the multiculturalist left and was accused of fueling radicalization in a polarized political atmosphere.
⁴⁷
In Spring 2006, her neighbors won a court case to evict her for fear of a terrorist attack. In May, she was informed by the immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, of her own party, that her Dutch citizenship was being revoked because she had filed false information on her 1992 asylum application.
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Although Parliament voted to allow her accelerated naturalization, in September, she left for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
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Unable to receive protection from the U.S. government as a foreign national, she began living in hiding under privately funded protection.
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In February 2008, French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy told her that her case’s connection with freedom of opinion made her a good candidate for citizenship and protection in France. But when she traveled to Paris, Parliament rejected her application. The French Human Rights Minister, Rama Yada, with the backing of President Sarkozy, supported the creation of an EU-based protection fund for victims like Hirsi Ali. However, as of 2011, she continued to live, mainly in isolation, in the United States.
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Geert Wilders was a controversial—and threatened—figure in the Netherlands even before the international uproar over
Fitna
, discussed in
chapter 10
. After Wilders called Yasser Arafat a terrorist in October 2003, a man was convicted for writing on an Islamist website that “Wilders should be punished by death for his
fascist statements on Islam and the Palestinian cause.” In the month following the van Gogh slaying, he received some thirty death threats and was forced into hiding. One online video promised a reward of seventy-two virgins in paradise for his beheading.
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In 2006, Wilders told an interviewer, “Videos on Islamic websites show my picture and name to the sound of what appears to be knives cutting through flesh while a voiceover says I will be beheaded.”
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However, he declared that if he went silent, “the people who use violence, bullets, and knives to get their way will win.”
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By 2005, he was moving each night to a different safe house, under the constant protection of bodyguards. He could appear in public only at sessions of Parliament. After living in a cell at the high-security Zeist prison for several months, Wilders finally moved to a permanent safe house in early March 2005. The Dutch government, apparently anticipating a recurring problem, purchased several similar houses to accommodate politicians facing future death threats.
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Wilders’s proposals themselves raise issues of intolerance. He issued sweeping calls to “stop the Islamization of the Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more schools, no more imams.”
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He has sought to require imams to preach only in Dutch and to prevent foreign imams from preaching in the Netherlands at all. He has called for the government to pay Muslim immigrants to leave the country. In August 2007, he proposed an all-out ban on the sale, distribution, and use of the Qur’an—at home, in mosques, and for any purpose other than academic research. He charged that Islam’s sacred text, which he compared to
Mein Kampf
, “incites hatred and killing” and was to blame for attacks on the founder of an ex-Muslims’ group. Claiming to know that the proposal would never make it through the Dutch legislature, Wilders said he only intended it as a warning against using the Qur’an to legitimize violence.
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Wilders describes Islam as a “backward religion,” “totally incompatible” with democracy, but insists that he makes “a distinction between the religion and the people.”
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He acknowledges the existence of a “majority of moderate Muslims in the Netherlands” who “have nothing to do with terrorism” and maintains that his rage is not aimed at them but at “the growing minority of radical Muslims” who follow a “fascistic” ideology. Toward the latter, he advocates closing known jihadist mosques, revoking the Dutch citizenship of radical imams, and arresting extremists under surveillance by security personnel.
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In a setting marked by growing Islamist radicalism and a dearth of more temperate figures willing to address the problem, Wilders has enjoyed political success. He left the liberal VVD party to form the Freedom Party, which won nine seats in the 2006 elections and the second-largest number of seats in the Netherlands’ 2009 European parliament elections. In early 2010, he was put on trial by the Dutch government for hate speech against Islam, yet in the June 2010 Dutch elections, the Freedom Party received the third-highest number of votes. He was acquitted of hate speech charges in 2011.

In April 2005, Norwegian Pentecostal preacher Runar Sogaard received death threats and required police protection after the distribution of CDs of one of his sermons, in which he criticized the Islamic prophet. Preaching in March in Stockholm, he made fun of several religions, including Christianity, and called Muhammad “a confused pedophile.” Hundreds of Muslims demonstrated outside the church. The leader of Sweden’s imam council, in an apparent threat, “demanded that Christian communities repudiate Sogaard’s remarks, and promised that Sweden would avoid the ugly scenes experienced in Holland.” One Islamist stated to a Swedish paper that “even if I see Runar while he has major police protection I will shoot him to death.”
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An Islamist website of “the Army of Ansar Al-Sunnah in Sweden,” which claimed to have established a local terror training camp, vowed to “capture and punish” Sogaard.
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