You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (11 page)

Several cartoonists mocked Flemming Rose, Kåre Bluitgen and themselves rather than Muhammad. In one drawing, a cartoonist sweats with fear as he draws a straight portrait of Muhammad. A self-fulfilling prophecy, since the artists duly received death threats. In another, a figure (presumably Muhammad) attempts to calm down two furious armed followers with the words, ‘Relax, it’s just a drawing by a cartoonist from the south-west of Denmark.’ One artist showed Bluitgen wearing a turban and holding up a stickman portrait of Muhammad. An orange bearing the slogan ‘PR Stunt’ is perched on the turban’s top. The orange baffled foreigners, but local readers got the point that Bluitgen was seeking to up his profile and make money out of the controversy, because in Danish the phrase ‘to have an orange drop into your turban’ means to receive undeserved good fortune. Another artist had an every-man character saying that he is unable to pick out Muhammad from an identity parade of religious figures. Among them is Kåre Bluitgen, who is holding up a sign which says ‘Kåre’s public relations, call and get an offer’.

Nor did the cartoonists miss the argument that in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, Islam was the religion of clerics with real power to ruin the lives of others, but in Denmark it was the religion of immigrants on the margin of society. In one drawing, by Lars Refn, a schoolboy captioned as ‘Mohammed’ from ‘Valby School class 7A’ – which identified him as coming from a poor immigrant area of Copenhagen – taunts the editors at
Jyllands-Posten
. The boy has written a slogan in Farsi on a blackboard, which reads ‘
Jyllands-Posten
journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs’. Little good did Refn’s decision to attack the newspaper and defend immigrants do him: he was the first of the cartoonists to receive death threats. Apparently there are people who will kill you for drawing pictures of boys called ‘Mohammed’. The remaining cartoons were unremarkable. One was an abstract drawing of a group of women whose heads are formed from traditional Arabic symbols of a star and a crescent, along with a poem criticising the Prophet for ‘keeping women under yoke’. Then there was a picture of Muhammad with a star and crescent forming one eye and the outline of his face. And finally, a reverent picture of the Prophet leading a donkey through the desert, entirely suitable for use in a children’s book.

If writers and artists were required under pain of death to be careful about how they mocked the papacy’s ban on contraception, they would not be able to make an effective critique of how religious dogma facilitates the spread of the Aids epidemic. Satire generalises. It speaks with a clear voice or no voice at all. Satirists cannot argue with caveats, particularly when the caveat the religious insist on is that satirists remove religion from criticisms of religious violence and religious oppression.

I will not pretend that the publication of the cartoons was met with equanimity. Jamaat-e-Islami, inevitably, urged the Pakistani government to issue a reward for anyone who killed the cartoonists, and many Danish Muslims were offended. About 3,500 people attended a protest in Copenhagen, and the police moved two cartoonists to safe houses. Imams and ambassadors from Muslim countries demanded meetings with the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He replied that a meeting was pointless, because ‘free speech goes far and the Danish government has no influence over what the press writes’. Quite properly for a democratic leader, he said that what the press printed was not the business of his government, or of foreign dictatorships for that matter. The police found no grounds for prosecution because, as the prime minister had said, Denmark was a free country.

For all the initial demonstrations, the fact remained that Rose published the cartoons on 30 September 2005, but the violence did not begin in earnest until January 2006. In the interval, newspapers in many countries, including the Egyptian weekly
El Fagr
, printed the cartoons, without raising significant protests.

Much of the credit for turning a mild satire into a crisis must go to three reactionary imams, to whom Denmark had offered asylum. French television gave viewers a glimpse of their ideology when it caught one of them, Ahmed Akkari, on camera implicitly threatening a liberal Muslim leader, Naser Khader, a member of the Danish parliament. According to the footage, Akkari said: ‘If Khader becomes minister of integration, shouldn’t someone dispatch two guys to blow up him and his ministry?’ He later said he was ‘jesting’. For a man who wanted to ban cartoons, he had a broad sense of humour. The imams had a political as well as a religious interest in whipping up a crisis that might place them at the head of Danish Islam. A survey in March 2006 found that Khader was Danish Muslims’ most popular spokesman, followed by a left-wing Pakistani doctor who shared Khader’s beliefs in secularism and sexual equality. Akkari and his friends trailed well behind their liberal rivals.

In December 2005 – two months after the paper published the cartoons – the three imams went to an Arab League meeting in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. The league issued a statement condemning freedom of speech being used as a pretext to defame religion. A separate delegation briefed Bashar Assad’s Ba’athist dictatorship in Syria. The imams carried with them a forty-three-page dossier which contained all twelve of the
Jyllands-Posten
cartoons. Helpfully, someone had added three other images, supposedly of Muhammad – one of a man wearing a plastic pig mask, one of a praying man being sodomised by a dog, and one of a devilish Muhammad – all of which were considerably more offensive than anything the paper had published. The imams claimed that they had been included for context, to ‘give an insight into how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims’. But where did these pictures originate? In two cases, no one knows if they were anything more than the sort of scrawl which is regularly found on toilet walls. Bloggers quickly identified the ‘pig’ picture as an Associated Press photograph taken in August 2005 at an agricultural fair in Trie-sur-Baïse, in the French Pyrenees, which had nothing to do with Muhammad. Instead of showing the Prophet, it showed Jacques Barrot, a French farmer, who was competing in the village’s annual ‘pig-squealing competition’, complete with plastic snout and pig’s ears. Along with other locals, he was dressing up and demonstrating his pig-imitating skills as part of an annual promotion of the region’s excellent pork dishes. Barrot didn’t even win.

After the briefing by the imams came a direct call at the beginning of February 2006 from Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, for ‘an international day of anger for God and his prophet’. Danes and anyone associated with them became a target.

As the crisis grew,
Jyllands-Posten
received more than a hundred credible threats. Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya withdrew their ambassadors from Denmark. In Gaza, gunmen stormed the EU offices demanding that Europe apologise. In Libya, the police shot fifteen people dead who were protesting against reports that an Italian minister had worn a T-shirt with the cartoons on it. In all 139 people were to die, as police fired into crowds in Nigeria and Afghanistan as well as Libya. The owners of
France Soir
fired the paper’s editor for running the cartoons as a gesture of solidarity with his Danish colleagues, and then rehired him. In Damascus, demonstrators attacked the Danish embassy and the Norwegian embassy. Iranian militants attacked the Danish embassy in Tehran and firebombed it. Demonstrators in Lahore attacked branches of the American-owned Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Holiday Inn chains, while Muslim customers boycotted Lego, Bang & Olufsen and Arla Foods, which at least had the merit of being Danish-owned. Osama bin Laden blamed Jews and Crusaders for the cartoons, and said no apology could stop the rage.

As late as January 2010, a Somali armed with an axe and a knife broke into the home of Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn the picture of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Westergaard dived into a panic room and pressed the alarm, as the Somali tried to batter the door down. The police shot the intruder in the leg, but a spokesman for the Somali al-Shabaab terror group implied that there would be plenty more where he came from: ‘We appreciate the incident in which a Muslim Somali boy attacked the devil who abused our prophet Muhammad and we call upon all Muslims around the world to target the people like him.’

As striking as the violence was the reaction of liberals. Across the world, demonstrators were attacking the embassies and nationals of a small social democratic country in northern Europe and boycotting its goods because of twelve cartoons. Its prime minister had held true to the values of anti-fascism and anti-communism and refused to abandon freedom of speech within the law, despite the pressure on him to go along with repression. The assault on Denmark was political, and not only because radical imams were seeking to supplant their liberal rivals and make themselves the ‘authentic’ voice of Danish Islam. The countries that demanded that Denmark apologise had political agendas of their own. George W. Bush’s plan to extend democracy to the Middle East appalled the Egyptian dictatorship. By manufacturing a scandal about Danish cartoons, Mubarak hoped he could show the naïve Americans that ‘Western’ freedoms were not for Egyptians, and it was better to leave them under the control of the elite, a fiction he succeeded in maintaining until his subject people contradicted him in Tahrir Square in 2011. The Iranian and Syrian dictatorships used the crisis to bolster their regimes by whipping up hatred against the Western enemy, the better to distract attention from their grim rule.

From the behaviour of the majority of Western liberals, you would never have guessed that dictatorial regimes and ideologies were attacking fundamental principles for self-interested reasons. In 1989, a large section of liberal opinion rallied to Salman Rushdie, regardless of whether it thought
The Satanic Verses
was a good book or not. By 2006, many liberals had abandoned the basic tenet of a free society that the intention of a speaker or writer is irrelevant to his or her right to enjoy freedom of speech and publication. If Flemming Rose had commissioned cartoons mocking America and the Bush administration had protested, liberals would have clasped him to their pounding chests, because his intention would have been
good
. But because he had allowed cartoonists to criticise Islam, albeit mildly, his intention was
bad
, and therefore the enemies of liberalism could take their revenge on him, his cartoonists and his country.

Bill Clinton and European rabbis said the drawings reminded them of the anti-Semitic cartoons of fascist Europe – an odd comparison, because the leaders of Syria, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood were anti-Semites. Jack Straw, the then British Home Secretary, praised the British press for not running the cartoons, while the Council of Europe criticised the Danish government for invoking the apparently irrelevant concept of ‘freedom of the press’ when it refused to take action against the ‘insulting’ cartoons.

The reaction of the Yale University Press encapsulated Western deference. Without waiting to receive a threat, it censored pre-emptively, and refused to carry pictures of the cartoons in a supposedly serious academic book about the controversy. The book’s author treated arguments about freedom of speech and women’s rights as if they were ancient notions that need not detain the modern reader, and could not have been ‘fairer’ to their opponents. Nevertheless, Yale said it would have had ‘blood on its hands’ if it had shown readers the cartoons its author was analysing. Murders would not be the responsibility of the murderers, but of the publishers, because ‘republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence’.

Until the twentieth century, Western writers were frightened of criticising Christianity. Britain took until 2008 to abolish its blasphemy law, although it had fallen into disuse long before then. America’s constitutional protection of free speech and press freedom meant that blasphemy had never been an offence in the United States, but social pressures and the potential of Christian groups to stage protests and boycotts made it a de facto crime. That power to censor has gone. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of
South Park
, acknowledged its passing at the time of the cartoon crisis: ‘It really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have. We’ve had him say bad words. We’ve had him shoot a gun. We’ve had him kill people. We can do whatever we want.’

Islam was another matter.
South Park
’s network Comedy Central would not allow the show to run a simple image of Muhammad during the affair, but at least it was honest about its reasons. Other US networks that banned images of Muhammad said they were censoring because they were liberals who wanted to display their respect and tolerance. ‘No you’re not,’ Stone said. ‘You’re afraid of getting blown up. That’s what you’re afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: “We’re afraid of getting blown up.”’

In autumn 2011, the French satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
responded to the depressing success of an Islamist party in Tunisia’s first election after the Arab Spring. As its target was a religious group, it satirised religious beliefs – what was it meant to do? The cover featured a cartoon of Muhammad with a bubble coming from his mouth saying, ‘One hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing.’ An arsonist bombed
Charlie Hebdo
’s office. French politicians defended freedom of speech, but the guardians of liberal orthodoxy could not match their fortitude.
Time
deprecated the ‘notoriously impertinent paper’ and others who ‘openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy’. By then the notion that religious criminals did not have moral responsibility for their crimes was everywhere. Muslims were an undifferentiated block, naturally prone to violence, rather than a vast denominational group with reactionary and liberal strands.