• The art of expressing yourself -   Zubair Butt Hussain

• Governments playing with fire -   Anders Jerichow

• The relevance for Jews and Israelis -   Dina Porat

• The need for mutual understanding -   Mousa Qous

"Eastern rules" in the West?
 Robert S. Leiken

Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the Danish Jyllands-Posten, told me he commissioned the cartoons to test Europe's "self-censorship". He cited illustrators' refusal to lend their name to a Danish children's book with Muhammad on the cover, and mentioned similar problems finding translators for works by Ayaan Hirst Ali, the Somali Dutch parliamentarian who has criticized Islam and now must surround herself with armed guards. The Tate Gallery withdrew a John Latham installation with torn copies of the Bible, the Talmud and the Quran, fearing that after July 7, 2024 "it might be misunderstood." Rose's deeper background was the murder of the Dutch Theo Van Gogh for a caustic film about Islam.

A radical imam who could not extort a Danish government apology for cartoons in a private newspaper then formed delegations that carried to the Middle East a 43-page dossier. Besides the original cartoons, the dossier featured three items never published: Muhammad as a pedophile, a Muslim at prayer being sodomized by a dog, and a photograph of a man dressed as a pig, with the caption "this is the real picture of Muhammad." These last, rather than the ones published by Rose, circulated among outraged Muslims in Europe and the Middle East.

Robert S. Leiken is director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center in Washington, DC, and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and Security after 9/11.

If anyone thought the case of the 12 cartoons would be shortly forgotten, time has shown the drawings not to have been merely a footnote to a larger body of work.

For a long time, no dialogue in Denmark about these drawings seemed likely, and Danish Muslims, it appeared, would simply have to get used to the way the notion of free speech is understood (or exploited) in this country. As the case developed, however, neither freedom of speech nor the alleged self-censorship that sparked the whole issue in the first place, has gained much. Instead, what appeared to be a local issue became a global scandal, and Denmark found itself truly on the map.

In the long run, I hope Denmark's reputation will be restored. But for this to happen, the country needs to take on a dialogue in which all parties are treated as equals and none is beyond the acceptable pale.

It is instructive that, to begin with, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen did not wish to even grant an audience to the 11 ambassadors who had protested the cartoons. The Danish government, he said, does not control Danish media, and the right of free expression is sacrosanct in a country with a free press.

The tune changed soon enough, but unfortunately only after Danish companies started feeling the squeeze. The 11 ambassadors came in from the cold and Rasmussen appeared, contrite, on several Arab satellite channels, where he personally distanced himself from the newspaper in question, Jyllands-Posten. Many Danes--Muslim and non-Muslim--expressed their appreciation for his handling of the issue. Well, better late than never.

Jyllands-Posten, the paper that served up the cartoons in the first place under the banner of freedom of expression and in protest at what it said it saw as self-censorship in the Danish media's treatment of Islam, expressed regret that the cartoons offended Muslim sensibilities. It did not, however, apologize. It is akin to kicking someone in the head and then regretting the pain that person feels, rather than the action that caused it.

The paper sees no cause and effect with its publication of the cartoons and the worldwide protests, the economic boycott and shameful pictures of Danish flags and embassies burning. That blame it instead apportions to a small group of Danish Muslims who traveled to the Middle East with the cartoons. Allegations have surfaced that this delegation brought with them not just the cartoons that were actually published but a number of other offensive drawings, some of them rabidly anti-Muslim, that had not been published. I will be the first to condemn any false representation of the case, but it is ludicrous to believe that this small delegation of Danish Muslims should be so influential as to spark off worldwide demonstrations. If they were that powerful, the case would have been settled long ago, in Denmark.

More worrying is the fact that it is not only Jyllands-Posten that is ascribing such power to this little group of people. Some elected politicians are doing the same, notably from within the sitting government and their parliamentary supporters from the populist rightwing Danish People's Party, which has seen its popularity rise in opinion polls.

As the situation stands, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, is "on holiday". Whether that holiday was compulsory is not known, but it came after he announced to CNN that his paper was considering cooperating with an Iranian newspaper to publish cartoons depicting the Holocaust.

The newspaper quickly announced that no such thing was being considered. That is a relief. To ridicule and insult another minority is neither here nor there regarding the publication of these 12 drawings, and we do not need either evidence that Jyllands-Posten can sink so low again or that it practices selective self-censorship. It is well known that cartoons depicting Jesus were deemed offensive to religious sensitivities as late as in 2024 and therefore not fit for publication by the paper.

What this case shows more than anything else is the need for a dialogue in Denmark regarding Islam--one that is not the domain merely of so-called intellectuals busy demonizing the religion. Indeed, a non-stigmatizing debate is a binding necessity if Denmark's global reputation is ever to recover. All Danes, no matter their religious affiliation, are duty bound to take this debate seriously in an effort to combat the growing Islamophobia and general xenophobia that is on the rise in Denmark.

In this context, the responsibility falls no less to the Muslim minority to demystify their doings and intentions in this country. That responsibility would include establishing a clear distance from Muslims who commit shameful acts in the name of Islam. The message from Danish Muslims should be that violent acts are not an acceptable means of showing one's offended sensibilities. - Published 16/2/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Zubair Butt Hussain is a regular commentator in Danish media.

Basically, the great Danish cartoon affair isn't about cartoons. For sure, quite a lot of people globally were offended by the cartoons, published by a paper based in the provincial capital of Aarhus, Denmark. But most of the people demonstrating against the cartoons or against Denmark never read this paper and never saw these drawings. And while several embassies were attacked and burned by angry mobs in Damascus, Beirut and Tehran; while hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated and set cars on fire as far away as Lahore, Jakarta and Kabul; and while governments took the "cartoon affair" to the Organization of Islamic Conference, the UN and other international bodies, a basic reality has conveniently been put aside: a lot worse has been said and done against religious minorities in European countries--just as in Arab and Muslim countries.

In European countries, minorities--Muslim as well as Jewish--have been subject to demonization and immigrants have been targets of discriminatory practices and exclusivist policies. And in many Arab countries as well as Iran, religious minorities and migrants have routinely been subject to discrimination, lack of tolerance as well as intimidation. Just ask Shi'ites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Bedouins in Kuwait, Jews in Syria or Copts in Egypt. Yet, neither European nor Middle Eastern practices on any of these deep-rooted problems spurred demonstrators by the millions to take to the streets or governments to instigate an international crisis. In fact, illustrations, different images, even cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have surfaced many times in history.

But strange things happen. It took the Syrian government more than three months to feel "shocked" about these cartoons. In Syria, where illegal demonstrations are rarely seen, several thousand demonstrators were suddenly allowed to confront and burn the Danish embassy. In Saudi Arabia, where street demonstrations are even rarer, motorcades of youngsters--several months after the publication of the cartoons-were suddenly allowed to cruise through Riyadh with anti-Danish banners. And in Kuwait, a sheikh--again, several months after publication--was allowed publicly to call for a violent response to a cartoonist several thousand kilometers away.

Certainly, the cartoon affair confirmed the reality of globalization. A publisher in a Danish province will be held responsible for an act that went far beyond the horizon of his decisions. But those who read and listen to rumors in other continents will also be held responsible for their reactions. You cannot, in Kabul or Beirut, call for the death of some Danish media personality without people getting the news in Denmark. Seeds of hatred travel easily across boundaries. Responsibility goes both ways.

No doubt these cartoons offended a great number of Muslims in Denmark. Some 3,000 Muslims demonstrated peacefully in protest. Some 17,000 Muslims signed petitions against them. But the vast majority of the 200,000-strong Danish Muslim community shrugged their shoulders, expecting the cartoons to be quickly forgotten and probably hoping for more serious social and cultural problems to be dealt with.

In the great cartoon affair, governments have been playing with fire. In Denmark, the government tried to reduce the affair to a question of freedom of speech. In the Middle East, governments insisted on seeing the affair as a question of religious respect and made the most of the issue, trying to preempt rivals in the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah or underground terrorist groups. Both sides fear intervention either by European fascists or Middle Eastern religious terrorists.

So far, as these lines are written, no Quran has been burned publicly in European countries, certainly not in Denmark, where the government is working hard to ensure that it won't happen. And no major terror incident against Danish targets has taken place. But the seeds of hatred have been sown, and the whole affair has demonstrated the potential for lunatics to make the most of it.

In one way, it looks like a clean case. On the European side, it is a clean question of freedom of speech; in the Muslim world, a clear offense against the Prophet and Islam. Yet, in Europe traditions do call for sensitivity to religious feeling, just as hate speech generally--and wisely--is banned. And in the Middle East there is traditionally a pragmatic acknowledgement that Islamic dogma cannot prevail in non-Muslim societies.

But in both worlds the great cartoon affair has become an outlet for underlying frustrations. In Europe, marginalized immigrant societies have found a cultural symbol in the cartoon affair of their sense that they are being denied opportunities, equality and respect. In the Middle East, populations who would otherwise find plenty of reason for local frustration--the continued political oppression in their own countries, the Iraq war, the continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the Darfour genocide, lack of freedom of speech--were allowed to let off plenty of steam.

The cartoon affair itself will come to an end, if not for other reasons then because people in Denmark and the Middle East have more important problems to deal with than a set of drawings that would normally be ignored.

But when the dust has settled, European exclusion of immigrant minorities will continue to nurture growing frustration. And in the Middle East, government mismanagement of state affairs will see continued attempts to distract local opposition with international affairs. - Published 16/2/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Anders Jerichow is president of Danish PEN and editor at Politiken daily, Copenhagen.

The current wave of violent Muslim protests against caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad that were published a few months ago by a Danish daily, is a reminder of Samuel Huntington's prophecy on the clash of civilizations. Back in the middle of the 1990s the American scholar envisioned the character of the next world war as a clash between cultures, not armies; a struggle over values and ways of life, not territories or natural resources; an unavoidable clash between Islam and the West.

Many commentators now consider the Danish caricatures as a mere excuse seized upon by Muslim radicals to start a wave of violent reaction against the West and one of its most sacred values, freedom of speech--in effect, a far-reaching, Jihad-like assault that constitutes punishment for the Islamophobia that has spread in the very countries that have been opened to Muslim immigrants. If indeed the struggle is such a world-engulfing one, what is its relevance to Jews and Israelis?

Let me try to pin-point two possible answers. They focus on the call for a compromise to calm down the situation, and the use of the Holocaust by Iran.

During a conference held in Malaysia this week, a compromise was suggested by former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami: the wave of violence would subside, provided that a commitment is made by western countries not to use the freedom of speech in order to defame Muslims' sacred concepts. The most logical reaction to this proposal among Jews is, first, how come we never launched a loud campaign to protest against thousands of far more abusive caricatures, published worldwide for hundreds of years, which have defamed everything dear to us? Did we simply get used to them? And second, we should call upon the United Nations, the European Union, Council of Europe and OSCE to formulate a commitment that freedom of speech will not be used to defame any of the religions.

As an historian who for about 15 years has headed an institute monitoring anti-Semitism and racism, where thousands of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist caricatures are catalogued, I must offer, however reluctantly, a rather pessimistic view: the caricaturing of Jews, their holy scripts, traditions and leaders started more than a thousand years ago, and their negative image is now deeply embedded in western Christian culture. It is part and parcel of every aspect of expression, from sculpture to painting, from prayer books to language. Each generation has found its own means of expression; the caricature is today's main vehicle, blending anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, but its leitmotifs and the basic elements of the negative Jewish images remain intact.

One might also argue that during the last decade it is Muslim rather than Christian propaganda that has repeatedly portrayed a cruel, bloodthirsty image of the Jew and Israeli. Yet Muslim propaganda in general and Muslim caricaturists in particular have adopted Christian elements, from the blood libel to the crucifixion, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Der Sturmer's medieval physical depiction of the Jew. The portrayal of Palestinians as Christian martyrs persecuted by Jews helps transmit their message. The uprooting of such commonly used and politicized imagery seems hardly possible.

Why did Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinezhad announce a "scholars" conference and a caricatures contest on the Holocaust, and not, say, on Theodor Herzl? Because since the beginning of the 1990s, with the waves of newcomers and foreign workers from the poor southern hemisphere flooding the rich industrial North, legislation there against racism and deprivation of minority rights has become the order of the day. Today it includes some 15 laws against anti-Semitism and denial of the Holocaust. Hence the comparison seemingly begs itself: freedom of speech excludes only the Holocaust.

Still, let me suggest a less well-known reason for the Iranian anti-Holocaust crusade: that same legislation against Holocaust denial, especially in western and central European countries, has put in jail a number of its central figures, such as Germar Rudolf (Germany), Ernst Zundel (Canada) and Siegfried Verbeke (Belgium), with David Irving under arrest and awaiting trial in Austria. Others, fleeing trial, have found refuge in Iran. I would suggest, though I naturally cannot prove it, that the Swiss Jurgen Graf, the Austrian Wolfgang Froelich and the German Horst Mahler, who are either residing in Tehran or visit there frequently, are the moving spirits behind the Iranian campaign. They, and others who have good contacts there such as the French Roger Garaudy, who converted to Islam and is considered a hero in the Arab world, or the Americans Mark Weber and Bradley Smith, are the "scholars" behind the upcoming conference and caricatures contest. Again, Muslim propaganda using Christian and western anti-Jewish elements.

One can already enter the "Official reaction of the Iranian cartoonists to the publication of the drawings humiliating on the Mohamed prophet" [sic] site, which features dozens of very recently-received caricatures from the world at large and warns that the Americans might close the site down any minute because it represents freedom fighters persecuted by the evil powers.

My pessimism notwithstanding, let us call upon the UN Third Committee on Discrimination to ask the representatives of each religion to define precisely what are its most sacred values, and then to reach an agreement signed by all nations not to abuse freedom of speech in order to defame them. This is the least the international community can do.- Published 16/2/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Prof. Dina Porat heads The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Racism and Anti-Semitism at The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies, Tel-Aviv University.

As a secular Palestinian Muslim, I hold the right to freedom of expression in the highest esteem. However, this does not, in any way, mean that this right should be used to disrespect or insult any religious beliefs, whatever they may be.

The most recent events are stark evidence that the West has no inkling of what the Muslim world is really about, nor what burden of responsibility comes with the right to freedom of expression.

To the people of the Muslim world, the caricatures published by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten and then republished in several other European papers are not merely an insult, but a defamation of the very values Muslims across the world hold sacred. We have long prided ourselves that as Muslims we respect all of God's prophets, be they Moses, Jesus or Mohammed. Therefore, the insult to the Prophet Mohammed by a group that is not only not Muslim, but also not Middle Eastern, was perceived as an offense against the very core of who we as Muslims and Arabs understand ourselves to be.

There is also an inherent double standard. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad publicly questioned whether any event in history called the Holocaust had taken place, the western world was up in arms. The statement was immediately labeled "anti-Semitic". When the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb-strapped turban were published across Europe, however, this was merely considered "freedom of expression".

In fact, one of the biggest blows in this affair was that struck to our image of the West, which we for so long have held in the highest esteem. To many, the United States and Europe were the pinnacle of democracy, the "system that worked", and a model of personal, religious and political freedom that we felt obliged to strive toward.

Following the lack of apology from the Danish government--and the belated apology from Jyllands-Posten--for the offense against one of the world's major religions, the Muslim and Arab view of the West's perceived civil liberties was brought into question. Was the West's famed "freedom of expression" simply a carte blanche to impinge on the beliefs of others, namely Muslims? And why was this "right" only exercised against Muslims and not Jews, for example, or Buddhists or any other religious community for that matter?

And thus the rage. Most Muslims, both here in Palestine and across the Islamic world, were justified in their condemnation of the distasteful cartoons, but a number of factors came into play to cause the situation to spiral out of control.

Since the events of 9/11, the Muslim world has felt under attack from the West, with a narrative of war between good and evil created and perpetuated by US President George W. Bush, who proclaimed the war on terror a new "crusade". This "crusade" has manifested itself over the past four years in several ways.

The Muslim world--both religious and secular--has mostly considered the events that followed the attacks on the US as a direct attack on Islam, be it the pursuit of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the demeaning capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein or the abuse of prisoners in the Abu Ghreib prison, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere at the hands of US and British troops.

The escalated Israeli measures in occupied Palestine constituted yet another sore spot. Israel was quick to ride the wave of the "war on terror", demonizing Palestinian Islamic movements and neatly fitting them into the same category as Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaeda. Given the world's mindset following 9/11, this proved a simple task. The US and Europe catered to Israeli demands and put Hamas and the Islamic Jihad on their list of terrorist organizations even though neither group has ever launched an attack on American or European targets.

So, for the Muslims of the world, the stage had already been set for an eruption of pent up anger and frustration at the West. The cartoons were merely the spark that ignited the inferno.

However, this is not to justify the acts of violence that followed. The burning of and attacks on European embassies and government institutions in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza were uncalled for, to say the least. There are several ways for people to express their condemnation or even rage at something without resorting to violence. Muslim clergy across the Islamic world called for this, denouncing the vigilantism and calling for a halt to the unbridled outrage. But, I believe, Muslim extremists already inclined to violent expression took full advantage of the situation to fan the flames of fury. In the case of the cartoons, this was not difficult given the sensitive subject at hand. For Muslims, it is considered blasphemy to depict the image of any prophet, but to have depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist was literally entering into the realm of the unforgivable.

Nonetheless, I think the Muslim world erred. Instead of using this incident to its advantage and voicing its objections in a civilized manner, it played into the hands of the worst prejudices about Islam in the western world. We were seen as violent extremists who are too narrow-minded to appreciate a value such as freedom of expression.

Much needs to be done to rectify this unfortunate situation. International laws banning the offense or insult of any religious group or symbols should be legislated. I also think that in this case, Jyllands-Posten should be made to pay compensation to the Danish government and people for the economic losses Denmark incurred from the publication of these cartoons, as a result of the boycott of its products in the Muslim world. This may deter other newspapers from publishing similar offensive material in the future.

Finally, I think the European Union has a role in repairing the damage that was done. In the past, the EU has created forums for communication and cooperation between the two worlds, such as the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. Recent events have effectively undone much of what Europe has been trying to create in the past several years. The key to righting the wrong is not a shuttle tour by EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, but real bridge-building between Europe and the Muslim and Arab world. Once peoples come together, it is far less likely that any misconceptions about the other will be construed, thus making offenses such as those against the Prophet Mohammed hopefully something of the past. - Published 16/2/2006 © bitterlemons-international.org

Mousa Qous is the Arabic media coordinator of Miftah, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy.