Danish Cartoons

M
y adopted country has finally distinguished itself. Though I may still have to explain to other Americans that Denmark lies just north of Germany, I will not likely have to inform them of its existence as an independent country. A bunch of cartoons, and the response they provoked, has taken care of that.
Though it’s clear that the violent response to the drawings is indefensible, there can be little doubt that they were a willful attempt to denigrate Islam, a religion whose faithful make up 5 percent of the EU’s citizens, is routinely maligned not only in Denmark but across the West. Coming from a country with over 200,000 Muslims that nevertheless hasn't give them the legal right to build a single mosque nor land for one Muslim cemetery, the insult is even more abhorrent. Their printing was particularly egregious because the newspaper's editorial board had encouraged a competition amongst the cartoonists, and therefore could reasonably be taken to represent the views of a large number of the Danish public. Denmark’s current government is a coalition between the right – akin to George W. Bush’s, with whom it is a partner in the Iraq invasion – and the extreme right, openly racist Danish People’s Party, akin to France’s National Front. Denmark is not now, nor ever has it ever been, an easy place to be a foreigner, much less an Arab Muslim.
In the sixties and seventies Denmark, like most Scandinavian countries, was ruled by the Social Democrats, who had a conscientious policy of welcoming a proportionately large number of asylum seekers. But while the government opened its arms, the public at large were not quite as welcoming. The implicit message to foreigners in Denmark, a provincial, somewhat isolated country with strong traditions amongst its 5.8 million people, is that all are welcome, as long as they act, think, and look Danish. As recently as the 90’s Arab women were required to take classes in bicycle riding as a condition of legal residency. As an American who has lived in several non-Western countries before moving here, I have never had harder time assimilating, nor felt a more pressing need to do so, despite being a blond haired, blue-eyed white man. My Egyptian friend, despite holding a Danish passport and having lived here since he was 3, assures me that he will never feel at home here.
T
he prevailing sentiment in Denmark these days is that there is an immigrant ‘problem,’ and it is true that they do, in fact, make up for a disproportionate number of Denmark’s criminal class, but this is clearly a problem owned as much by Denmark as the criminals themselves, who find few opportunities for education and employment in a public sphere where they are systematically excluded and marginalized, by exactly the sort of racism that took place in the Jyllands Posten newspaper. (Let’s not kid ourselves to think that it was simply an attack on Islam, and not an attack on Arabs as well; you cannot insult the one without insulting the other.) The editors of the newspaper knew that printing a denigrating cartoon of the prophet Mohammed was uniquely insulting, because to Muslims, the act of illustration of the prophet is in itself blasphemous. It was an inherently inflammatory act.
It's difficult to find a corollary that can illustrate this clearly for Christian minds, but in Denmark it is illustrative to take the case of some flip flop sandals, printed with a kitschy Mary mother of Jesus motif here a couple of years ago. Within 24 hours of their release onto retailers’ shelves they were removed amidst a storm of public protest, and the retailer promptly issued a public apology. The Christians couldn’t stomach the idea of someone stepping on the Holy Mother. Now imagine if the Christians were as vilified and marginalized in Denmark as the Muslims are, and that the retailer had made the sandals not ignorantly, but willfully, and refused to apologize, and continued selling them, and even took the role of the victim after the protests, and you begin to get an accurate picture of what's happening here today. Though the initial cartoon protests in Denmark were as vociferous as was possible for an excluded people, the Muslims knew that they never stood a chance here. So they took their message to their compatriots abroad, and now, suddenly Denmark is compelled to pay attention.
B
ut of course, it does not take a student of Islam to realize that Muslims and Arabs in Europe and the US have been under attack ever since 9/11. Witness the headscarf ban in France, thinly veiled as an attempt to preserve separation of church and state, the prominence of far right wing parties across western Europe, or the mosque burnings that followed the murder of Van Gogh in the Netherlands. The cartoons and the protests that followed should not be seen in isolation but in a context of racism that is matched in its venom only by the fervor of the Islamist extremists who are the first to respond them. I will say again that I do not condone the acts of violence, and consider them as base and idiotic as the cartoons. But what, exactly, did the newspaper expect?
The printing of the cartoons was not an 'attempt to stop self censorship' that the editors disingenuously claim; if that had been the case, they would have printed an intelligent and controversial contribution to the debate around Islam and Arab integration in Denmark, such as a columnists’ round table on the issue of disproportionate criminality amongst Danes of Arab descent, for example, rather than the sophomoric and, frankly, humorless caricatures that they did print. This was a blatantly provocative act, and provocative acts are meant, by definition, to incite a response; forgive me if I fail to shed a tear for Jyllands Posten now that they play the role of the victim – as they are here in Denmark – when they got a much bigger response than they bargained for. While they may have been within their free speech rights they certainly weren’t being good citizens, and it the punishment for poor citizens is be visited on their countries at large; as an American, this also a principle familiar to me. Denmark’s prime minister doesn’t do his people any favors when he refuses to take a strong stand against such blatant racism, though the motive behind his position – remember the coalition government with the far right wing party – is not too hard to figure out.
T
he editors at Jyllands Posten knew full well that such attacks polarize debate, and polarization gives the extremists on the opposite side of one’s viewpoint immediate ownership of the center of their own constituency. An American in Denmark can tell you what any Dane already knows; this newspaper is the Danish equivalent of Fox news, and not unlike the information issued by the Bush administration for who Fox is the mouthpiece, it feeds off the fear of their readers; without the boogey men of extremist Islam, this paper would have to invent some new ones.
And now the infamous ‘Muslim street’ that the journalists have warned us about is striking back, from Riyadh to Jakarta, and all the Muslims are proving to be just as bellicose as they always warned us. The rumors of the Arab menace and the inherent belligerence of Islam itself have been confirmed. The editors at Jyllands Posten cry that the enemies of free speech have won; ‘no Danish editor would dare to print such cartoons again for years to come,’ they say, as if any Dane worthy of the title would have printed them in the first place. The obvious conclusion to draw from the recent events, both ahere in Denmark and elsewhere, is that Arabs and Muslims refuse to be systematically marginalized and routinely humiliated for their religion or their background, in the east or in the west. These cartoons would never have sparked such a violent reaction had there not already been a vast store of resentment from which to draw; sometimes it only takes a straw to break the camel’s back.