Scanorama, the passenger magazine of SAS, the Scandinavian public airline, has pulled a profile of a popular Danish politician and member of parliament who is known for his fierce stand against radical Islam.

Naser Khader, a Syrian born Palastinian with a secular Muslim background who grew up in Denmark, emerged as a rallying national figure during the cartoon crisis in 2006. Khader founded the organization Democratic Muslims when Denmark’s embassies were set on fire in the Middle East, and he spoke out against a group of radical imams in Denmark who had incited public opinion and governments in the Muslim world against Denmark.

Khader has received several death threats and is living with additional security around the clock. Last year he founded a new political party New Alliance that won five seats in parliament in the November election.

According to Khader Scanorama had been working on the profile for months, and the magazine was planning to put him on the cover of its February issue. The story was supposed to focus on his fight against islamists and the price he has been paying in terms of threats to himself and his family.

Jyllands-Posten has learned that the decision to pull the profile was made due to security. Scanorama’s editor Sandra Carpenter has refused to comment on the decision and to explain what kind of security risk the profile of Khader constitutes to SAS.

Naser Khader is dissappointed by the decision.

“If true, this means that they have given in to threats or imagined threats, and that’s bending the knee to the islamists,” says Khader.

At the corporate headquarters in Sweden SAS spokesman Bertil Ternert insists that neither the top management nor the security department have been involved in the decision to pull the profile.

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Today the former editor of the Belorussian newspaper Zgoda Aleksandr Sdvizhkov was sentenced to three years in prison for having republished the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

This case is a perfect illustration of how insult laws are being used by authoritarian regimes to clamp down on dissenting voices.

Zgoda was a newspaper affiliated with the Social Democratic Party of Belarus. They supported a candidate from the opposition in the presidential election in the spring of 2006. After the publication of the cartoons the State Committee for religious and ethnic affairs (a government department) approached the local mufti Ismail Varanovich, and brought his attention to the publication. They even made a copy of the paper that, by the way, never reached its reader, and asked the mufti to notify the police that the religious sensibilities of muslims in Belarus had been offended.

The authorities immediately pressed criminal charges against Aleksandr Sdvizhkov for ”inciting racial, ethnic and religious hatred” (article 130, 2 of the criminal code). Sdvizhkov fled to Russia and the newspaper was closed in March 2006, two days before the presidential election. President Aleksandr Lukashenko won a third term receiving 86 percent of the vote.

This tragic event stresses the point that in an increasingly globalized world supporters of the right to free speech have to fight insult laws on a global level. That means that Denmark and other European countries have to get rid of blasphemy laws and anti-racism laws, because oppressors in other parts of the world will point to those laws defending their own that are being used against critics, dissenters and minorities.

They will claim:

“You have laws against blasphemy, religious hatred and racism, and so do we. So why all the fuzz? We are just acting as a civilized country.”

The only limitation on speech we need are laws against incitement to violence. All other laws should be removed from the books. In a democracy no one has a right not to be offended.

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On Friday the trial against Belarussian editor Aleksandr Sdvizhkov opened in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Sdvizhkov, former deputy editor of the now closed independent weekly Zgoda, is charged with ”incitement to religious hatred” after having published the Danish Mohammed cartoons back in February 2006. If convicted Sdvizhkov can be sentenced from three to ten years in prison.

Eigth of the 12 original cartoons were printed alongside an editoral with the headline ”Political creation”, which chronicled the international uproar protesting the Danish cartoons in the beginning of February 2006.

At the time of publication Belarussian KGB-agents confiscated the weekly’s computers, discs, and other electronic equipment.

The probe against the paper was initiated after authorities received complaints from the state Committee for Religious and Ethnic Affairs on behalf of the small Muslim community in Belarus.

Deputy editor Aleksandr Sdvizhkov fled to Russia before criminal charges were brought against him, but he was arrested two months ago when he returned to Belarus.

The paper was closed down in March 2006 two days before the presidential election March 19 which paved the way for a third term for dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko. The cartoon affair was seen as a pretext for taking action against an outlet covering the candidate from the opposition.

Sdvizhkov was in charge of the publication of the cartoons, but the newspaper never made it to the reader. The top management interferred and stopped distribution of the issue before it reached newspaper vendors in Minsk.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2006 nine countries around the world took punitive actions against publications or their editors for reprinting one or more of the 12 cartoons run by Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. Six newspapers in three countries have been forced to close and at least nine journalists in four countries have been arrested and faced potential criminal prosecution. Governments also issued censorship orders and sponsored protests.

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Sweden and Norway were ready to deploy 400 soldiers in Darfur to support the UN peacekeeping forces, but due to the cartoon crisis in 2006 the regime in Khartoum has refused to accept troops from Scandinavia.

”The Opposition from Sudan makes it impossible to keep the promise of a Norwegian-Swedish commitment,” the ministers of foreign affairs from the two countries said in a statement.

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir stated in November that he won’t accept soldiers from Scandinavian countries, where newspapers published cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

”No one who speaks blasphemeous of the prophet will be allowed to set foot on Sudan soil,” said President al-Bashir.

The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of Mohammed in September 2005, and the Norwegian newspaper Magazinet reprinted the cartoons in January 2006. None of the big Swedish newspapers published the cartoons, but in the fall of 2007 they reproduced drawings of Mohammed as a dog by Swedish artist Lars Vilks that were censored by several Swedish art institutions.

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Farshad Kholgi, an Iranian born Danish comedian, actor and writer, has been reading John Steinbeck’s satirical novel The Short Reign of Philip IV from 1957. The novel was published in Danish the same year with a special dedication to the Danish reader:

I not only hope that you will like my small book. Due to my knowledge of Danish humor I am acutally convinced that is the case. I have always thought that one of the national virtues of the Danes was their comically serious and almost deadly satirical attitude to life, an attitude that probably served them well as one of the most important and deadly weapons in the fight against Hitler.

Kholgi who fled Iran at the age of 13 thinks that the Danes have changed for the worse since the time of Steinbeck’s satirical novel. He is disappointed that intellectuals, writers and artists refrain from joining the fight against Islamism. Kholgi tells Berlingske Tidende:

”They don’t want to get involved in the fight even though Denmark lived through the cartoon crisis, and even though Danes were threatened, and flags were burned. Not a single movie have been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.”

Kholgi who recently published a powerful book about growing up in Iran and living under a totalitarian theocracy, is working on a comedy about the cartoon crisis. He is very critical of colleagues using all their satirical fire power against the government coalition in stead of taking issue with Islamism.

”It’s like focusing on a candle light when your house is on fire.”

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In a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious society no citizen has a special right not to be offended. That’s an important precondition to keep democracy alive and safeguard the right to free speech. That doesn’t mean that one gratuitously should offend anyone, though there may be situations when there is no other way to express the content of what an individual wants to say.

This is important in a society where groups with different taboos, histories and codes of conduct live side by side, because no one can be obliged to know everything about every other group and individual and take this into account before one speaks publicly.

This is evident from a recent incident in Germany. December 23 the state funded tv-station ARD broadcasted an episode of the popular show Crime Scene (Tatort), in which murder and incest within a modern Alevi family in Germany takes place.

The Alevis belong to a more tolerant and progressive Muslim minority that has been persecuted in the Middle East because they insist on equality between man and woman and the sexes are allowed to pray together. The Alevis preach tolerance towards people of other faiths and ethnic groups. According to the Alevis in the Ottoman Empire the Sunni Muslims circulated an incest libel against them because of their liberal brand of Islam.

Last Sunday 20.000 Alevi Muslims gathered in front of the Cologne cathedral to protest the broadcast of the crime show. The protest was peaceful.

”The Alevis respect freedom of the press and are opposed to any ban on cultural expression. But these values must not be used to insult the dignity of a minority,” Mehmet Ali Toprak, leader of the Alevi community in Germany, told AFP.

Angelina Maccarone, the director of the episode, said that she wasn’t aware of the Alevi incest libel, and explained that she had no intention what so ever to support any prejudice against the Alevis.

Before the broadcast of the episode Alevi community leaders approached the television network to pursuade it to cancel the show. They refused to do so, but in the opening credits they ran a statement making it clear that the episode was fiction.

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I am reading the works of the Chechen historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (1908-1997) and stumbled upon his obituary on the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. At the time of Stalin’s death (1953) a lot of reasonable people in the West either paid tribute to Uncle Joe or gave what they saw as a balanced view of the life and work of the Soviet dictator. How wrong they were.

Avtorkhanov would have none of it. He spend five years in Stalin’s jails from 1937 until 1942, was tortured, witnessed a mock execution and then fled to Nazi Germany, where he spend the rest of the war writing about his experience in the Soviet Union.

A Russian proverb says: About the dead you either speak well or you keep silent. Well, Avtorkhanov didn’t exactly follow that advice. Here is his obituary published in the magazine Free Caucasus in March 1953:

“Stalin has finally died. His wolfish heart has stopped beating, his diabolical mind has stopped operating. A man has passed away who had nothing human about him what so ever, no soul, no love, no compassion. A professionel tormentor’s cold hearted brutality and a bestial instinct for survival put him closer to the species of beasts than to mankind.

A war of destruction on his legacy! That’s the verdict of our people. And that verdict will live on with future generations.”
Not bad.

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A study commissioned by Germany’s Interior Ministry warns that 180.000 of the country’s 3 million Muslims are willing to commit violence in the name of Islam, which amounts to 6 percent of the Muslim population of Germany. The number is alarmingly high because a similar study a year ago showed that just 32.000, slightly more than 1 percent, were radical islamists representing a potential security threat.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says in a foreword that the study leads to the ”worrying conclusion that a serious potential for Islamist radicalization has developed in Germany”.

Christine Haderthauer, secretary general of the conservative the Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that her party ”has always warned against the dangers of parallel societies. Our fears have been confirmed in a shocking manner.”

The study was conducted by two researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Hamburg. The authors interviewed 1,750 Muslims of whom around 40 percent were German citizens. Almost 40 percent of the respondents think that ”physical violence is justified as a reaction against the threat of the West’s threat to Islam”. The study doesn’t clarify what is meant by ”threat” and for what exactly the West should be hold accountable.

The survey found that more than half of the respondents felt themselves excluded from German society, and felt they were being treated as foreigners. the study has caused a big debate in Germany about the need for better integration.

Unfortunately the study doesn’t specify what the respondents mean by ”being treated as a foreigner”. My Russian born wife feels being treated as a foreigner every other day, but that does’t make her want to commit violence in the name of the Russian orthodox church. Or that she is supporting terrorist attacks on the West, when she feels that Russia is being mistreated by the West or has not been given a fair hearing.

People from the countryside who arrive in Copenhagen and start to speak in a heavy provincial accent also risk being treated as ”foreigners”. If it means discrimination it’s bad and should be fought in every possible way.

But sometimes treating people as foreigners also implies some kind of reluctance to engage them in debate or being very polite without challenging their views if they say something outrageous. That’s the multiculturalist way of integration, and it has obviously failed.

In fact, the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark was an act of inclusion and integration of Muslims into the Danish tradition of religious satire, though a majority of Muslims saw it differently. The cartoons send an important message to Muslims saying: We don’t expect more or less of you, we expect exactly the same of you as of everybody else, and that’s a full recogniction of your presence in society as equal citizens.

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The European left has for some time denounced Denmark as xenophobic due to strict immigration laws, and quite a few leftists saw the cartoon crisis as a case in point. The Danes were mocking a weak minority, and are not prepared to live and act in a globalized world. Being married to an immigrant myself and having spent 14 years abroad as a foreign correspondent I have always felt this was a narrow minded and provincial attitude.

The reality is quite the opposite. Since the conservative coalition of Prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen came into power in late 2001 the Danes have once and again proved that they are quite open minded when it comes to cross cultural dialogue and a positive attitude towards the process of globalisation.

Here are some figures: In 2001 when the Social Democrats were still in power Denmark granted permanent residence to 36.000 immigrants. Last year the figure had risen to 46.000. In 2001 37 percent of immigrants and refugees felt they were being discriminated against according to an opinion poll. In 2007, i.e. after the cartoon crisis, the number had fallen to 27 percent.

And now comes a new European Union survey showing that the Danes are the most cosmopolitan nation in the EU, a result that confirms the trend.

The survey’s fieldwork was carried out between 13 and 17 of november, 2007. More than 27.000 randomly selected citizens aged 15 and above were interviewed in the twenty seven member states of the European Union.

According to the survey 56 percent of the Danes are cosmopolitans followed by the Swedes and the Dutch with 48 percent and 47 percent.

The result is based on two factors: The Danes are more positive towards cross cultural interaction than the majority of the Europeans, and they don’t think that young people should be tied down by the traditions of their parents.

”We are a highly individualistic society,” Rune Stubager, associate professor of Aarhus university, told Jyllands-Posten.

”The Danes are not as sceptical towards immigration as Europeans from the east and the south,” Mr. Stubager added.

Mohammad Rafiq, a consultant on integration understands why Denmark is at the top of the survey, though the figures don’t necessarily translate into working integration.

Says Mr. Rafiq to Jyllands-Posten:

”The Danes are willing to commit themselves to building bridges and establishing contacts to people coming from a different ethnic background. They don’t succeed, but it’s because of the immigrants who are xenophobic towards the Danes. They tend to isolate themselves instead of meeting the Danes in sports clubs for example.”

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Iran has agreed to pay for 60 pct. of the damages done to Denmark’s embassy in Teheran during the cartoon crisis back in February 2006, i.e. 120.000 dollars. The Iranian regime was behind a so called ”spontaneous” demonstration in front of the embassy. The compensation covers the material damage, while the Iranians have refused to pay for extra security measures and evacuation of the embassy staff right before the attack, February 6th 2006.

Says Denmark’s minister of foreign affairs, Per Stig Moeller:

”This is a very satisfactory solution from our point of point view. Usually it’s very difficult to get any kind of compensation from Iran in this kind of cases, that’s no secret.”

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