It has become clear that framing immigration as a moral question no longer works politically, and it won’t alter the political trends. “You can’t as a political party in Denmark today say that you don’t care how many Syrians or Afghans or Eritreans or Iraqis come to Denmark. You can’t!” exclaims the conservative journalist Arne Hardis. “Even the left is saying the amount matters but what can we do—but they acknowledge that it’s a problem.” He believes that the Social Democrats’ tougher stance may finally be paying off and stanching the bleeding of votes. The party, he says, “might be coming out of the woods,” and after being “plagued night and day for thirty years,” they seem to be holding their numbers in the polls despite the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe.39 The former justice minister Bødskov is confident that the worst has passed. “I think we have lost what we can. I don’t think we can lose much more,” he says of the party’s 26 percent showing in the 2015 election.40
Sixteen years after the shock of 2001, a quick glance at the political map of Denmark reveals inroads as impressive as the Republican Party’s sweep of the reliably Democratic upper Midwest. Mayor Petersen logs on to his computer and pulls up Denmark’s election atlas, like the granular county-by-county results published after elections in the United States. Their maps also have red and blue for the Social Democrats and the centre-right Venstre Party, and now there’s yellow, a relatively new colour representing the DPP.
Pointing at a sea of yellow in rural areas of the country with few foreigners, Petersen explains, “The reason here is not about immigration politics,” it’s about jobs, especially manufacturing jobs that no longer exist or have moved abroad. “They feel like they’re isolated from the growth in the country. They’re disappointed. They’re angry,” he told me in April 2016 before the Republican primaries had concluded. “Like people who are following Donald Trump, actually.”41
PART II
FROM OUTCASTS TO TERRORISTS
4
THE DANISH CARTOON CRISIS AND THE LIMITS OF FREE SPEECH
In 2005, the editors at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s largest newspaper, were troubled by what they saw as a rising tide of self-censorship in the media, publishing, and popular culture. So Flemming Rose, the editor of the culture section at the time, invited a group of well-known Danish cartoonists to draw the Prophet Muhammad. The initial response was underwhelming, but within a few months—through a combination of diplomatic pressure from Islamic countries, a dismissive response to their complaints from the Danish government, and a concerted campaign by local imams—the cartoons had become a sensation and a scandal.
Those who were offended boycotted Danish dairy products. In Iraq and Pakistan, there were violent protests outside Danish embassies. In Beirut and Damascus, the Danish missions were set on fire. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador, and Danish flags were burned in the West Bank.1 The cartoon controversy had a long afterlife, and not just at the French weekly Charlie Hebdo, where their reprinting was cited as grounds for murder ten years later.
Rose, the editor who commissioned the infamous Muhammad cartoons, is not—as some critics have suggested—a raving Islamophobe or a card-carrying member of the Danish People’s Party. He is a free-speech absolutist whose thinking has much more to do with his experience as a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union, where he saw how totalitarian states muzzled dissidents and human rights activists by sending them to Siberia or worse. Moreover, Rose fervently believes in newspapers’ capacity for heroism and social transformation.
As Rose relates in his book The Tyranny of Silence, his own family was saved from crushing poverty, homelessness, and separation thanks to the efforts of a crusading journalist, Rachel Bæklund, and an editor, Victor Andreasen. Rose’s father had walked out on the family when he was very young, throwing their lives into disarray; when his mother couldn’t find a permanent place to live, he and his brother were put in foster care. Bæklund interviewed Rose’s mother, with him and his brother in tow, at Copenhagen’s central station. The editor, Andreasen, splashed the story on the front page of Denmark’s leading tabloid under the headline “Are You Sleeping Well, Mr Housing Minister?” on September 2, 1963, with a prominent photo of Rose over the caption, “Mommy, when can we have somewhere to live?”2 He was five years old.
At university, Rose studied Russian language and literature and later spent sixteen years as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, where he got to know many legendary Soviet dissidents and human rights activists. He eventually married a Russian, whose father was a committed Stalinist, and covered the fall of communism for the Danish press in the early 1990s. The experience was formative. Censorship was rife, and those who dared to stand up to the state were sent to labour camps or exiled. Like other academics and American writers, such as Richard Pipes and his son, Daniel, whose frame of reference was Soviet totalitarianism, Rose found in modern political Islam a similar demand to toe the line and a propensity for violence against those who dared to insult the party or the state.
The model is of course not fully transferable, and Denmark’s small Muslim community cannot be compared to the Soviet state apparatus. The dissidents who produced underground samizdat newsletters and documented the Kremlin’s human rights violations were up against a behemoth. When Rose and Jyllands-Posten took on the local Muslim clergy, they were up against a small minority. But on the ideological level, there were some similarities; both groups viewed criticism of their deities, whether sacred or secular, as off limits and legitimately punishable by violence.
Rose’s more compelling Russian parallel is the recent spate of censorship in Russian art galleries, following precisely the same logic; Russian Orthodox Christians, once a marginalized group in the Communist era, now have the full backing of the Kremlin. When, in 2003, cutting-edge curators and atheist artists dared to display artwork that might anger religious Christians—a painting featuring Christ in front of the Coca-Cola logo, as well as a church built from empty vodka bottles—enraged Orthodox activists slashed the works and defaced them with spray paint. All six vandals were let off; a judge explained that they were shocked and their vandalism was an understandable reaction to profane images.3 The same has occurred with Hindu fundamentalists in India and Sikhs opposed to a theater production in London.
As Rose argues, in all these cases, “the perpetrators were transformed into victims, victims into perpetrators.”4 The argument really comes down to a distinction between words and deeds. And by giving in to demands for censorship, whether from angry Muslims or the Russian Orthodox Church, the concept of tolerance is turned on its head, placing the burden on the speaker rather than the listener. No longer are citizens in a diverse society expected to tolerate unsavory views, reluctantly accepting what they disapprove of; the speaker is expected to “keep quiet and refrain from saying things that others may dislike.” The result is that offended parties are considered victims while the offenders, like Rose, “are exposed to death threats, physical assault and sometimes even murder.”5 In addition to excusing violence, this twisted concept of tolerance takes away all human agency.
As Kenan Malik writes in his book on the Rushdie crisis, “Between words and deeds stands a human being, with a mind of his own, an ability to judge between right and wrong and a responsibility to face up to his own actions. It is not the words themselves that cause things to happen.… Words have consequences only if we choose to make them consequential.”6
For Malik, the greatest sin of the outside world during the cartoon controversy was to afford the Danish imams who fanned the flames of the crisis by distributing the published images (as well as some other ones that had nothing to do with Jyllands-Posten,) the honor of being “spokesmen for Danish Muslims.” Coverage of the anti-cartoon protests seemed to confer a similar status on the Egyptian, Saudi, and Iranian governments despite the fact that many of Europe’s Muslims are refugees from those same countries and would likely object to those states’ officials speaking on their behalf.7 Malik decries the man
y Western liberals who dismissed Muslim Danes like parliamentarian Naser Khader as an inauthentic Muslim because he eschewed taking offence and protesting against the cartoons the way other Muslims did. “In liberal eyes … to be a real Muslim is to find the cartoons offensive. Once Muslim authenticity is so defined then only a figure like Abu Laban [one of the hard-line imams] can be seen as a true Muslim voice.”8
The same problem has plagued Britain’s multicultural policies. As Malik argues, the government has “treated minority communities as homogeneous wholes, ignoring conflicts within those communities.… They have empowered not minority communities but so-called community leaders who owe their influence largely to the relationship they possess with the state.”9 During the Rushdie controversy, this dynamic played out on a worldwide stage, and the objective of the Muslim community’s self-appointed “leaders” was not, as Malik puts it, to “protect Muslim communities from unconscionable attack from anti-Muslim bigots” but to “assert their right to be the true voice of Islam” by silencing or sidelining their more moderate or radical critics within the community. And, in his estimation, these illiberal voices promoting violence against Rushdie in the late 1980s, like those fomenting anti-Danish sentiment in 2006, “succeeded at least in part because secular liberals embraced them,” turning them into the authentic representatives of a supposedly monolithic Muslim community.10
For certain people who had once identified with the left, the hypocrisy was too much. The writer Nick Cohen demanded to know why the liberal left was defending fundamentalist Islamists who clashed with everything they stood for. “Why will students hear a leftish post-modern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don?”11 And why on earth were supposed antifascists downplaying the crimes of the late twentieth century’s preeminent genocidal leader, Slobodan Milošević, questioning the existence of Serb concentration camps, and denouncing Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright for bombing Serbia as Noam Chomsky and some of his followers did? In Cohen’s view, the academic left had fled from anything resembling universal values and retreated into a relativist cocoon that didn’t differentiate between the Clinton administration and Milošević’s murderous regime.
The leftist intelligentsia saw American imperialism as the only true enemy and couldn’t imagine any other. As Cohen argued, “Writer after writer was incapable of grasping that people with brown skins were as capable as people with white skins were of forming a fascistic movement and murdering and oppressing others,” a stance on display once again in the wake of the cartoon crisis, when there was great reluctance to condemn the offended even when they turned to violence.12 The initial earthquake occasioned by the publication of the cartoons has had many aftershocks.
The elderly Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, famous and reviled for penning the image of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, was at home on New Year’s Day 2010 watching The Wizard of Oz with his five-year-old granddaughter. He had left the girl alone in front of the television to go to the bathroom when he heard the sound of glass shattering. An axe-wielding man had smashed through the garden door screaming, “I’ll kill you” as he chased the seventy-four-year-old Westergaard through the house. The cartoonist ran back to his bathroom, a designated safe room, and locked the door, leaving the terrified five-year-old, who had a broken leg, lying in a plaster cast on the couch.13
Westergaard’s house outside the city of Aarhus was already a fortress with CC TV security cameras, bulletproof windows, and a panic button designed to summon the police within two minutes. Since 2007, when the first credible death threats against him were confirmed by Denmark’s intelligence service, Westergaard and his wife had been shuttled from hotel to hotel and eventually secret flats when certain hotels refused to house him due to the security risks. His wife, Gitte, was told to leave her job at a local kindergarten until the mayor and the press intervened to reinstate her. We “lived in 10 different safe houses and drove 10 different cars,”14 he told a reporter. In the end, it was the safe room that saved his life.
The decision to leave his granddaughter alone rather than confront the attacker was harrowing, but security officials had told him that terrorists would target him, not his family, because in their view it was he who had offended Islam. They were right.
The attacker, a twenty-eight-year-old Somali man, had taken a train from Copenhagen to Aarhus with an axe and a knife in his bag, hailed a cab to Westergaard’s street, and jumped over a fence into the garden. He completely ignored the five-year-old and instead hacked at the reinforced bathroom door, screaming at the cartoonist within. When the police arrived, he ran from the house and hurled his axe at one of the officers. They shot him in the leg and arm.15 The man was charged with terrorism and two counts of attempted murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.16
The Danish cartoon controversy matters because it accelerated the country’s political shift toward the right. Danes who never contemplated voting for the DPP now saw their embassies on fire, an elderly compatriot nearly murdered in his own home in front of a child because of a drawing, and death threats made against some of their best-known journalists. Suddenly, the DPP’s platform was making sense.
They had warned that Muslims were extremists in waiting; now those warnings seemed to be coming true. The image that graced the cover of the DPP’s 2001 campaign manifesto, “Denmark’s Future: Your Country, Your Vote”, featuring angry bearded Muslims protesting aggressively, was now a daily occurrence.17 Politicians like Naser Khader, himself a Muslim and a refugee who came to Denmark as a child from Syria, drifted to the right of the political spectrum. Khader founded a group called Democratic Muslims and promptly received a death threat from one of the anti-cartoon imams.
Khader was once considered a man of the left, but his own politics have gradually moved to the right along with the country’s. The Mohammed cartoon crisis was a turning point for him. He has been attacked as an Uncle Tom by Islamic fundamentalists and criticized by those on the left for not taking offense at the cartoons, as “authentic Muslims” apparently should. “I left the Radikale Venstre because I felt I was homeless politically,” he says, referring to his former party. “The cartoon crisis made me change my political platform,” he adds, dismissing his former political home a hotbed of cultural relativism. His old party advocated dialogue with Islamists; Khader disagreed, arguing, “Sometimes you have to be very, very hard” on extremists. He complains about most Danes’ “naivety and superficial knowledge” of Islam and the Middle East. “It’s very frustrating when people don’t understand the DNA of this ideology,” he tells me.
Islamists tend to speak in a language that average Danes don’t understand unless they have some background in theology or the politics of the Arab world. “You need people that understand Islam and the Koran,” Khader argues. “If you don’t understand the history of Islam and their language, it’s very difficult” to make sense of the extremist groups’ ideologies and aims. He doesn’t think the far right has any special claim on such understanding; they have simply been more effective at mobilizing around the issue.
The DPP is not “more clever … or more expert on Islam than others. They don’t know anything about it!” he exclaims. But they were willing to speak about problems that voters were worried about while establishment parties looked the other way. They “succeed because you have a collective denial.… Now the other parties have woken up.”
To illustrate his point, he mentions a recent sermon by a prominent fundamentalist imam about whether Islam should dialogue with its enemies. As Khader recalls it, the imam asked: “Do you remember what Islam’s army did with God’s enemy at the Battle at Uhud?” The reference would be lost on most Danes, but not Khader. It is, he notes, a reference to a battle where Islamic soldiers massacred two Jewish tribes. Then, Khader recounts, the imam declared, “We should not dialogue with the enemy of God. We should trick them as we did in Uhud.” He is adamant that religious leaders l
ike this have no place in the country.18
In 2008, the same week that street riots were raging in Copenhagen in response to a police brutality case, seventeen publications decided to reprint the controversial cartoons in a show of solidarity with other newspapers being pressured in the courts in various countries.
The reappearance of the cartoons helped the riots evolve from a metropolitan Copenhagen event into a nationwide protest. The media, by portraying the riots as a mass phenomenon at a time when many people, including potential rioters, were glued to their televisions, played their part in spreading them. As one of the young men who participated told the sociologist Aydin Soei, “It’s not like young people here were calling around all over the country asking people to set things on fire. The media were our spin doctors.”19
Soei developed the concept of countercitizenship, or modborgerskab, a play on the Danish word for citizenship (medborgerskab), transforming a word that literally suggests living-with-ness with one that connotes a condition of living against or in opposition. The key causes of countercitizenship, he argues, are low education, low expectations, and the stigmatization that comes from living in areas that are constantly discussed as problems in public debates. Young Europeans from immigrant backgrounds are beginning to define themselves in opposition to society as countercitizens. In his view, the riots that rocked the Paris suburbs in 2005 and Copenhagen’s immigrant neighborhoods in 2008 stem from accumulated lack of opportunities and recognition.20
Denmark’s riots were touched off after police accosted and beat a sixty-year-old disabled Muslim man in the largely immigrant area of Nørrebro. The victim was a respected and well-known fixture in the community. The police initially denied the incident completely, blaming it on “boredom during the winter holidays,” and the officers were later acquitted of any wrongdoing.21
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