Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the 88 year old patriarch of Russian literature, has granted a rare interview to the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Solzhenitsyn defends the regime of former KGB colonel Vladimir Putin, and actively supports Putins assertive - some would say aggressive - foreign policy. Solzhenitsyn recently accepted a state prize from Putin, while he rejected similar awards from Putin’s predecessors Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

Solzhenitsyn explains:

”The prize in 1990 was proposed not by Gorbachev, but by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, then a part of the USSR. The prize was to be for The Gulag Archipelago. I declined the proposal, since I could not accept an award for a book written in the blood of millions.

In 1998, it was the country’s low point; this was the year when I published the book ”Russia in ruins”. Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia in to such dire straits.

The current State Prize is awarded not the president personally, but by a community of top experts. The Council on Science that nominated me for the award and the Council on Culture that supported the idea include some of the most highly respected people of the country, all of the authorities in their respective disciplines. The president, as head of state, awards the laureates on the national holiday.”

But what about the obvious limitations that Putin and his regime are imposing on Russian society? What about the liquidation of any real opposition and competive elections? What about the attacks on the press and the widening corruption that is said to be worse than during the Yeltsin years?

Solzhenitsyn doesn’t address these issues, though he lends his support to Putin’s abolition of elections of regional leaders.

On Putin’s past as a KGB-officer Solzhenitsyn says:

”Vladimir Putin – yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the Gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence that is not a negative in any country – sometimes it even draws praise. George Bush Sr. was not much criticized for being ex-head of the CIA, for example.”

Well, does Solzhenitsyn, in honesty, think that the Soviet Union was like ”any country”, and does he really believe in his pronounced symmetry between the two blocs during the Cold War?

Some years ago Solzhenitsyn published two volumes about the role of jews in Russian history. It caused a big debate. Some accused the writer of anti-semitism, others defended him. Here is his exchange with Der Spiegel on this issue.

SPIEGEL: Your recent two-volume work “200 Years Together” was an attempt to overcome a taboo against discussing the common history of Russians and Jews. These two volumes have provoked mainly perplexity in the West. You say the Jews are the leading force of global capital and they are among the foremost destroyers of the bourgeoisie. Are we to conclude from your rich array of sources that the Jews carry more responsibility than others for the failed Soviet experiment?

Solzhenitsyn: I avoid exactly that which your question implies: I do not call for any sort of scorekeeping or comparisons between the moral responsibility of one people or another; moreover, I completely exclude the notion of responsibility of one nation towards another. All I am calling for is self-reflection.

You can get the answer to your question from the book itself: “Every people must answer morally for all of its past — including that past which is shameful. Answer by what means? By attempting to comprehend: How could such a thing have been allowed? Where in all this is our error? And could it happen again? It is in that spirit, specifically, that it would behoove the Jewish people to answer, both for the revolutionary cutthroats and the ranks willing to serve them. Not to answer before other peoples, but to oneself, to one’s consciousness, and before God. Just as we Russians must answer — for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for those crazed revolutionary soldiers, for those savage sailors.”

Solzhenitsyn also addresses the worsening relationship between Russia and the West. Why is this happening?

”I can name many reasons, but the most interesting ones are psychological, i.e. the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. Admittedly, this was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia. It’s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when NATO started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a “knight of democracy” has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.

At the same time the West was enjoying its victory after the exhausting Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. In this context it was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a Third World country and would remain so forever. When Russia started to regain some of its strength as an economy and as a state, the West’s reaction — perhaps a subconscious one, based on erstwhile fears — was panic.

SPIEGEL: The West associated it with the ex-superpower, the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn: Which is too bad. But even before that, the West deluded itself — or maybe conveniently ignored the reality — by regarding Russia as a young democracy, whereas in fact there was no democracy at all. Of course Russia is not a democratic country yet; it is just starting to build democracy. It is all too easy to take Russia to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes.
But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West’s irrational refusal of this hand. No sooner did the USA accept Russia’s critically important aid in Afghanistan than it immediately started making newer and newer demands. As for Europe, its claims towards Russia are fairly transparently based on fears about energy, unjustified fears at that.

Isn’t it a luxury for the West to be pushing Russia aside now, especially in the face of new threats? In my last Western interview before I returned to Russia (for Forbes magazine in April 1994) I said: “If we look far into the future, one can see a time in the 21st century when both Europe and the USA will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

Karen Armstrong, British author of several books about Islam, fundamentalism and the life of the prophet Mohammed, former nun and self-described “freelance monotheist”, warns us against intolerance towards Islam and the Muslim world. Writing in The Guardian, she asserts that if the West were only more respectful of Islam, extremism might then fade away.

“Our inability to tolerate Islam not only contradicts our Western values; it could also become a major security risk,” she writes.

As evidence for her claim Armstrong cites Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons of the prophet Mohammed as well as petitions from UK Christian and Jewish communities to prevent construction of a large mosque in Abbey Mills, East London, whose doors would open to worshippers in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Either Armstrong is ill informed or she is deliberately excluding facts that contradict her narrative. Let’s first look at the mosque. In fact there is also a Muslim petition against the mega mosque project, and a Muslim member of the London Assembly has expressed doubts about it, if the financing, as suggested, comes from Saudi Arabia with its extremist Wahhabi version of Islam. Meanwhile in a further twist a nearby international Christian Centre, Europe’s biggest evangelical church, is being pulled down to make way for the Olympics.

According to the Times of London, Dr. Irfan al-Alawi, Europe director of the Centre for Islamic Pluralism, is “extremely concerned” about the spread of Tablighi Jamaat, the sect behind the mosque project.

“Tablighi are not moderate Muslims, they are a separatist movement. If this mosque were to go ahead it will be strictly run by the Tablighis; there will be no room for moderates,” he said in November last year.

Muslim community leader Asif Shakoor expressed equal unease about the project. He said that the Muslim petition was a response to a feeling that the voices of most Muslims in the area were not being heard. Some 3,000 Muslims signed the petition.

In February The Daily Telegraph reported that the government intends to block the building of the $600 million mega mosque that would hold between 12,000 and 70,000 worshippers, making it the biggest religious site in the UK. The largest Christian church in the country, Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, holds 3,000.

Backers of the mosque want it to serve as a reception centre for athletes and fans from the Islamic countries during the 2012 Olympics.

A government source told the Telegraph that “there were fears that the giant mosque could damage community relations in the area.”

But who is Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic sect behind the mosque?

It is a Deobandi Muslim organization with close links to the Wahhabi form of Islam in power in Saudi Arabia, and the driving force of the jihadist ideology shared by many terrorists. It is believed that Tablighi Jamaat gets funding through Saudi front organizations such as the World Muslim League, which back in 1978 subsidized the building of the Tablighi mosque in Dewsbury, which has become the European headquarters of the movement.

Tablighi neither has a formal organizational structure nor publishes details about the scope of its activities, its membership, or its finances. Because of the movement’s secrecy, scholars often have to rely on information from Tablighi supporters. It was founded in India in 1927. Tablighi doesn’t consider individual states to be legitimate. According to the French Tablighi expert Marc Gaborieau, its ultimate goal is a “planned conquest of the world”.

French intelligence reports describe Tablighi as the “antechamber of fundamentalism”, and two of the 7/7 bombers attended Tablighi mosques. So did John Walker Lindh, the American who joined the Taleban in Afghanistan, and the Oregon cell that conspired to bomb a synagogue and sought links to Al-Qaida. Other indicted terrorists, such as “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla, and Lyman Harris, who sought to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, were all members of Tablighi Jamaat at one time or another.

Alex Alexiev, vice president for research at the Center for Security Policy, concludes in an analysis of Tablighi in 2005:

“The estimated 15,000 Tablighi missionaries reportedly active in the United States present a serious national security problem. At best, they and their proxy groups form a powerful proselytizing movement that preaches extremism and disdain for religious tolerance, democracy, and separation of church and state. At worst, they represent an Islamist fifth column that aids and abets terrorism. Contrary to their benign treatment by scholars and academics, Tablighi Jamaat has more to do with political sedition than with religion.”

It seems to me that Armstrong would make a better case if she turned to the fundraising Saudis and asked them for a bit of reciprocity saying: It is difficult to argue for the building of a mosque here as long as you are not allowing the building of churches or any other sites of worship in your country, and as long as you will not even permit Christians to carry a Bible or let your guest workers practice their religion freely.

Next let’s look at the cartoon crisis. Armstrong draws an analogy between what she describes as “double standards” on both sides:

“For Muslims to protest against the Danish cartoonist’s depiction of the prophet as a terrorist, while carrying placards that threatened another 7/7 atrocity in London, represented a nihilistic failure of integrity. But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others.”

Here Armstrong makes two key errors. First, she alleges equivalence between making a cartoon and issuing death threats. As far as I know none of the cartoonists or editors including myself have threatened anyone or incited to violence. In fact we have court verdicts in Denmark and France confirming this, while three people have been convicted in the UK for soliciting murder during protests over the publication of the cartoons.

Second, Armstrong states that the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others. That’s not the case. The principle of free speech implies that you tolerate opinions differing from your own, and tolerance is demanded not of the one who speaks but of the one who listens - or views a cartoon. The publisher and the cartoonists fully complied with fundamental liberal values. Unfortunately, some Muslims didn’t. As George Orwell put it in his proposed preface to Animal Farm:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

German journalist, author and activist Günter Wallraff has taken the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) on its word of openness, tolerance and denunciation of a fatwa against the Indian born British writer Salman Rushdie. Wallraff, 64, therefore wants to read passages from the novel The Satanic Verses in a new mosque in Cologne, Germany, and have a discussion about the passages that have caused offense to Muslims.

“It’s a litmus test,” he said to a radio station.

Wallraff, who left the Catholic Church some years ago, is a friend of Mr. Rushdie who stayed in his house after having been subjected to a fatwa. The fatwa was issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeni in 1989, and Rushdie, fearing for his life, had to go into hiding. 10 years later the Iranian government said that they could’nt withdraw the fatwa, but that they would not act upon it. When Rushdie last month was knighted by the Queen of Great Britain it caused riots and protests in Pakistan and Iran.

Mr. Wallraff’s proposal has provoked a heated debate in Germany adding fuel to an already intense discussion about the building of the mosque that has divided Cologne, a city of almost 1 million people, of whom 12 pct. are Muslims, and has 45 mosques.

”Our hearts are open, our doors are open, our mosque is open,” Bekir Alboga, a 44 year old Turkish imam who moved to Germany at the age of 18, told the International Herald Tribune in the beginning of July.

Mr. Alboga is head of DITIB’s department for interreligious dialogue and invited Wallraff, who has supported the building of the mosque, to join a group of supporters. In doing so Mr. Alboga once again stressed the need for openness and dialogue. Mr. Wallraff, who is a long time resident of the working-class district, where the mosque is to be erected, accepted the invitation, and immediately made his controversial proposal. He said he wanted to test if the quest for dialogoue was meant in earnest and insisted that such an event would promote the integration of Muslims into German society.

Mr. Alboga didn’t reject the offer, but said it was up to DITIB’s board to decide. A week ago Wallraff after a second meeting with Mr.Alboga appeared to be optimistic that the reading and debate would actually take place.

”We had a constructive conversation,” Wallraff told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung after the meeting at the end of last week.

He also took issue with some of his critics who has denounced his proposal as a provocation, and said that DITIB never would have responded to his invitation to discuss The Satanic Verses if they had perceived it as a gratuitously provocation. In 1985 after the publication of the journalistic project Ganz Unten (At the Bottom), in which Wallraff as a reporter went undercover as an illegal Turkish guest worker by the name Ali Levent Sinirlioglu, the controversial reporter achieved almost cult status among Germany’s 2,7 million Turks. In the book he exposed big companies like MacDonald’s and Thyssen. In the words of Wallraff this experience has given him some credit of trust with the Turkish population.

”I am now taking advantage of this status,” Wallraff added.

Henryk M. Broder, a columnist of the newsmagazine Der Spiegel and author of the bestseller Hurrah, We Surrender, which is critical of German appeasement in the face of a growing Muslim population insisting on enforcing their rules on society at large, called Wallraff’s initiative ”actionism”.

”The issue isn’t whether you can read The Satanic Verses in a mosque or not. After all, it would never occur to anyone to serve non-kosher food in a synagogue or pork meat in a Catholic church on Good Friday.”

With all due respect – Henryk Broder is friend and I admire his writings and sense of humor – I think this is a false parallel. The right parallel to Mr. Broder’s examples would be to serve alcohol and pork meat in a mosque, and Mr. Wallraff isn’t calling for anything like that. Also, according to Mr. Wallraff, the mosque isn’t a holy building, but some kind of communal center where cultural activities take place.

Tolerance means one’s willingness to tolerate points of view that one actively dislikes, as long as they are expressed within the limits of the law. Threatening Salman Rushdie on his life because of a description of the prophet Mohammed that Muslims don’t like or perceive as blasphemeous is a terrifying example of intolerance, so if DITIB denounces the fatwa against Rushdie and sees the building of a mosque as an act of mutual tolerance and openness, wouldn’t it be an act of strong symbolic meaning to read and discuss the passages of the Satanic Verses in the very same mosque?

Wallraff, though, maybe too optimistic when he expects the discussion about the Satanic Verses to have a liberating effect marginalizing radicals.

”Can you imagine the scene in the mosque: It’s being read, and many won’t even find what they hear so bad, and some may even laugh. That would really break the ice,” Wallraff told Frankfurter Allgemeine.

So far the reaction from Germany’s Turkish population and opinion makers has been mixed.

Actress Sibel Kekilli said to Der Spiegel on line: ”It’s fundamentally important to confront Muslims with freedom of speech. But I wonder if the person who reads the book aloud would not endanger his or her life as a result. I would find it an interesting idea if the mosque were to take part in the event – after all, both sides have to adapt if there is not going to be gratuitous provocation.”

Ekin Deligöz, member of the German parliament for the Green Party, also to Der Spiegel on line: ”On the one hand I find it very brave, and if it really – as Günter Wallraff says – takes place as a joint event with the mosque then it could be a good signal for a modern Islam which is capable of dialogue. But if on the other it is just a protest event that is only intended to provoke, then on balance little would come out of it.

Ralph Giordano, a Holocaust surviver and writer, who also lives in Cologne, is strongly oppossed to building the mosque and has received death threats because of his opposition, is sceptical of Mr. Wallraff’s litmus test. Giordano basically thinks that integration of Muslims has failed.

”There is the Taquyya which in Islam allows for deception and simulation, when you have an disagreement with the infidels. DITIB is to me the materialization of taquyya. They will not be honest. Anyway, if the reading takes place, which I don’t think it will, it will be an alibi, pure tactics.”

Today the leader of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, was acquitted of defamation in a case initiated by the Islamic Society of Denmark, a salafist organization with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamic Society took the matter to court after Kjaersgaard in January 2006 in a newsletter called a group of Danish imams ”traitors”. Her comments followed the news of the imams travelling to the Middle East to provoke a boycott of Danish products and turn public opinion against Denmark and the newspaper Jyllands-Posten that in September 2005 published 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed as a reaction to widening selfcensorship in Western Europe.
”The verdict was expected,” Kjaersgaard said of the acquittal.
”I am relieved. It was stressful to be involved in this court case. I have spent a lot of time preparing the case with my lawyer. As a politician I have a right and an obligation to express my views, and that’s what I did in this matter. I am convinced that a lot of Danes shared my point of view back in those dramatic winterdays of 2006.”
Kasem Ahmad, spokesman for the Islamic Society, was disappointed with the acquittal. He said he would consider an appeal and criticised the court for having condoned an indirect death threat against Muslims.
”Traitors were killed in Denmark after the Second World War, so by using that word Pia Kjaersgaard indirectly justified violence against us,” he said.
The judge explained the acquittal by referring to Kjaersgaard’s use of the word ”traitors” as a general judgement about an issue being subject to debate in society, not as a specific term used to characterize a person committing treason against his country.
Danish politicians also took issue with yesterdays call by the Islamic Society for a fatwa against Jyllands-Posten.
Per Stig Møller, minister of foreign affairs, criticised Islamic Society for not accepting the rule of secular law in Denmark.
”That’s the way it works in Denmark, if you want to live here, you have to accept decisions by the court. If people don’t like it, they are free to leave.”
Karen Haekkerup, Socialdemocratic member of the committe on legal affairs in Parliament:
”It’s incomprehensible that someone wants a fatwa. It should suffice that the case is being tried in the Danish court system and at the European Human Rights Court. That’s the way the legal system works in Denmark. If anyone wants to add religious decrees to our legal system, I think one needs to consider if he or she wants to live in Denmark.”
The Common Council of Muslims distanced itself from the Islamic Society saying they supported taking the defamation charge to court, but added that everyone should accept the court’s verdict and move on.
Kasem Ahmad defended the decision to call for a fatwa by making it clear that it didn’t imply any threat of violence.
”We have been subject to so many provocations by you in the West. The latest example is the knightning of Salman Rushdie. Before that Jyllands-Posten insulted our prophet. Now we want directions from authoritative clerics in the Middle East on how to react.”
A fatwa is an answer by Muslim clerics to questions from Muslims on how to react in different situations. The best known fatwa was Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s call in 1989 for the killing of the writer Salman Rushdie for the publication of the novel ”The Satanic Verses” that according to Muslims contains passages insulting the prophet Mohammed.
Asked why Islamic Society cannot accept the ruling of a secular court in Denmark, Kasem Ahmad explained:
”This is not just about 200.000 Muslims in Denmark, it’s about 1,5 billion Muslims of the world whose prophet has been insulted.”
He added that he hoped the fatwa would call on all Muslims to ignore the provocations of the West.
That sounds encouraging, thank you, but it’s a little hard to believe. Yesterday Mr. Ahmad said the opposite, insisting that some day I will deeply regret the publication of the Mohammed cartoons. Let me also remind you that the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) with support from authoritative clerics in the Middle East is working systematically in all international organizations including the UN to make insulting the prophet a criminal offense all over the world. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most popular imam in the Middle East and closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, has called on the UN to ban any insult to the prophet. Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the Grand Mufti of Al-Alzhar University in Cairo who goes for a liberal in the West, has called for shutting down Jyllands-Posten and a three year jail sentence to the editor-in-chief Carsten Juste, and the depiction of me as a pig.
It’s no joke. Tantawi also called the Mohammed cartoons ”one of the most serious crimes ever committed”. At the time of his statement (August 2006) I made the following comment to the newspaper Berlingske Tidende:
”It gives food for thought, that he (Tantawi) believes it would be a punishment for me to be depicted as a pig. It confirms that the imam has a shocking lack of knowledge of our civilisation, and it confirms the need for dialogue. In the Arab world blasphemy laws are being used to suppress views differing from those in power.”
That same day my kids volunteered to draw me as a pig in order to put an end to the matter, though I am not sure it will do.

Islamic Society of Copenhagen can’t accept the secular laws of Denmark, and therefore they plan to seek support in the Middle East for a fatwa against Jyllands-Posten, if the newspaper is acquitted in a pending civic case, which a number of Muslim organizations has initiated against the paper, and if the European Human Rights Court also makes a decision that goes against the legal demands of the Muslims.
This is tomorrows top story in Jyllands-Posten.
”Until now nobody has had to answer for insulting our prophet. We have no choice but to ask for a fatwa,” says Kasem Ahmad, spokesman for Islamic Society, referring to the publication of the 12 cartoons of Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten September 30, 2005.
In November and December 2005 Islamic Society sent delegations to the Middle East deliberately giving false information about the situation for Muslims in Denmark, and bringing along offensive cartoons that were never published in any newspaper. Angry and violent demonstrations followed, 140-200 people were killed, most in Nigeria, Danish embassies were attacked and set on fire, and a region wide boycott of Danish product was initiated.
Jyllands-Posten was acquitted in the city court of Aarhus last year, but the Muslims have appealed the decision to a higher court.
The Muslims have sued the paper’s editor-in-chief Carsten Juste and me for defamation. Anything but acquittal will be a sensation, and the same goes for the European Human Rights Court, which in recent years have widened the limits of acceptable speech. Islamic Society has said that they also want an apology from the paper. In a similar case in France the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was aquitted in March after having published two of Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons and one of their own.
Apparently, Islamic Society don’t want to accept that the cartoon crisis is a thing of the past.
”No Muslim will ever forget that the prophet was insulted,” says Kasem Ahmad.
He adds that Islamic Society has well established contacts with clerics in the Middle East, and that Arab media will be contacted in order to put focus on the issue. At the time of the cartoon crisis Islamic Society was headed by the radical imam Abu Laban, a strong supporter of Osama bin Laden and in favor of establishing a Taleban-like Caliphate in the Muslim world. For a long time he was perceived as a moderate by the authorities. Abu Laban passed away this year and his place has been taken by Mostafa Chendid.
In March the new imam was interviewed by the Danish weekly Weekendavisen. At that time a fight was going on between the city council of Copenhagen and a group of young people who illegally had occupied a building bought by a Christian sect. Mostafa Chendid then called on the young people to respect the law and leave the building. That answer prompted the reporter to ask the imam, if he and his fellow Muslims then shouldn’t accept the verdict in the case against Jyllands-Posten that said, that it was legal to publish the 12 Mohammed cartoons.
”Next question. I don’t want to discuss it anymore. I am just saying that there are exceptions from every rule. And if these cartoons have insulted 1,4 billion Muslims, then…”
What can I say?
Islamic Society is basically notifying the public: we do not accept secular law, we want the sharia imposed, and if you don’t obey, we will take our case to clerics in the Muslim world to pass a legitimate verdict against the blasphemers.
An unveiled threat. Will supporters of secular law meet the challenge?
Friday the city court of Lyngby will make public its verdict in a defamation case initiated by Islamic Society against Pia Kjærsgaard, leader of the People’s party, who at the height of the cartoons crisis in January 2006 called member of Islamic Society “traitors”.

A tribute

The Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist and writer Doug Marlette died in a car accident Tuesday morning. He was on his way from his father’s funeral in Charlotte, N.C., when the truck in which he was a passenger hit a water spot and hydroplaned, struck a roadside sign and hit a tree. Marlette was 57. The driver, John Davenport, 33 and theater director at Oxford High School, Mississippi, survived the accident. The two were travelling to the high school to sit in on rehearsals of Marlette’s musical ”Kudzu: A Southern Musical”, based on a famous strip of the same name.
I never met Doug Marlette, but I admired him a lot and my thoughts go out to his family, friends and colleagues. He was an inspiring voice at the time of the cartoon crisis back in 2006. Marlette spoke on the basis of his own experience in 2002, when he received thousands of angry mails and threats from Muslims after having drawn a cartoon showing an Arab looking man driving a Ryder rental truck like the one used by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, carrying a nuclear warhead, and a caption reading ”What Would Mohammed Drive?”.
According to Marlette the cartoon was a takeoff on a controversy among some Protestants over the morality of driving gas-guzzling SUVs, ”What Would Jesus Drive?”
The Council on American-Islamic Relation (CAIR) demanded an apology, and initiated a mail-campaign against Marlette and the paper. So did the secretary general of the World Muslim League, who also insisted on guarantees from the Tallahassee Democrat, where Marlette worked at the time, not to publish such material again. Ironically, the cartoon was later removed from the book ”Killed cartoons”, a collection of controversial cartoons rejected by editors.
Doug Marlette refused to apologize.
”To a cartoonist working in the current geo-political atmosphere, it is a natural step to ask, ”What would Mohammed drive?”” a defiant Marlette told WorldNetDaily.com.
”And I am sorry to report, that the image in post-9/11 America that leaps to mind is the Ryder truck given to us by terrorist Timothy McVeigh, carrying a nuclear warhed and driven, alas, not by an Irish-Catholic or a Jewish Hasadim or a Southern Baptist, but, yes, by an Islamic Militant.”
Tallahassee Democrat executive editor John Winn Miller refrained from issuing an apology because the cartoon wasn’t published in the printed paper, just on the website. He explained in an editorial:
”Unbeknowst to me, we had an automatic system that placed all of Doug’s political cartoons on our website. When that happened with the bomb cartoon, we were flooded with thousands of e-mails and phone calls demanding an apology. We did not publish the cartoon, and we won’t because I don’t think it is particularly funny. And I, frankly, am uneasy about making fun of religious icons in the Democrat. We have run cartoons making fun of priests because of their actions in the abuse scandal – but not because of their religion. There were some cartoons that we did not run because we thought they crossed the line of good taste. Different editors draw that line in different places.”
Hm, hm, doesn’t sound very convincing to me. What would the editor have done, had he not received all those e-mails? I guess, he would have published the cartoon, and that leaves us with a dangerous line of reasoning: If you scream loud enough about how offended you are, if you intimidate enough, then we’ll do as you please.
Though the executive editor decided to pull Marlette’s cartoon he defended his right to ridicule, saying Marlette had som fair base for satire.
”While the vast majority of Muslims are a peaceful people and preach a peaceful religion, there are some who have subverted the messsage of the prophet Muhammed for their own violent purposes,” said Miller.
Marlette responded indirectly a couple of years later when he attacked newspaper managers for being too focused on the bottom line.
”…the managers are pursuing the central mandate of their business model: to constantly expand readership. Their position is: ”How can we expand readership if we make people mad? Anything that makes people think risks offending them and losing readership.” That the editorial cartoonists’ very reason for being is to provoke helps explain why they are the first to go…We cartoonist represent the untidy, untamable forces that corporate suits have always waged war on. We represent instinct, and we work in the most powerful, primitive and unsettling of vocabularies: images.”
Marlette left the Tallahassee Democrat last year, and joined the Tulsa World, a small family owned newspaper.
Naturally, the Mohammed cartoons in Jyllands-Posten and the death threats against the Danish cartoonists caught the attention of Doug Marlette, and in an interview in December 2005, i.e. six weeks before hell broke loose in the Middle East, he said to our reporter:
”True Muslims ought to rise up and condemn this kind of outrageous threats. If a religion sanctions the killing of artists it does not deserve its name.”
He saw the publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons and the ensuing debate as a sign of hope for cartooning and free speech.
”It’s a healthy sign that you have challenged the ban on depiction of the prophet, and it’s a sign of deep respect for Islam. In doing so, you are treating that religion as a mature and grown up faith able to cope with disrespect. But if this message of freedom cannot survive the next generation due to misplaced consideration or special treatment, or because journalistic institutions in the long run can’t withstand the pressure and the attacks, then the future looks bleak for all of us, especially for minorities. Minorities like the Muslims should be very eager to protect freedom of expression, because history teach us that when freedom of speech is done away with minorities are the first to suffer.”
In 2004 Marlette wrote a piece for the Nieman Reports, ”Freedom of Speech and the Editorial Cartoon, in which he said:
”…what does the obsolescence of the editorial cartoonist have to do with the health of the democracy? Cartoons are the acid test of the First Amendment. They push the boundaries of free speech by the very qualities that have endangered them: Cartoons are hard to defend. They strain reason and logic. They can’t say on the other hand. For as long as cartoons exist, Americans can be assured that we still have the right and the privilege to express controversial opinions and offend powerful interests…When we don’t exercise our freedom of expression in troublesome ways, we atrophy our best impulses. The First Amendment, the miracle of our system, is not just a passive shield of protection. In order to maintain our true, nationally defining diversity of ideas, it obligates journalists to be bold, writers to be fullthroated and uninhibited, and those blunt instruments of the free press, cartoonists like me, we must use it, swaggering and unapologetic.”

I have spend the past week at the 50th anniversary convention of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists and Cartoonists Rights Network International, a great organization that supports political cartoonists in danger around the world. CRNI gave this year’s award to the South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, a brave and honorable man who is the target of a million dollar law suit by South African president hopeful Jacob Zuma for a series of cartoons.
I was asked to give a speech at the ”Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award Dinner” at the National Press Club. Here it is in a slightly edited version:

Not long ago one of our editorial cartoonists celebrated his 25th anniversary with Jyllands-Posten. Over lunch he told an anecdote, that is said to be true. During the Second World War the great Pablo Picasso met a German officer, and they got into a conversation. When the officer heard the name of his counterpart he said:
”Oh, you are the one who created Guernica,” – to which Picasso replied: ”No, it wasn’t me, it was you.”

Do I need to add that the cartoonist telling this anecdote was the one who made the famous cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban.

As a matter of fact, earlier this year in the trial against the terrorists accused of the March 11 bombings in Madrid in 2004 a widow of one of the 192 victims showed up in court dressed in a T-shirt with a copy of this Mohammed-cartoon on the front.

This cartoonist has a fascinating story. He is now about 70. He grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in a small provincial town in the north west of Denmark. As a young man he rose in rebellion against his religious upbringing, and he has been an atheist ever since. No religious authority has been spared in his cartoons, and to those who are up in arms insisting that we should have been able to anticipate the uproar over the publication of the Mohammed cartoons I must say that the cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was published in Jyllands-Posten a few times before the page with the 12 cartoons appeared in the paper, September 30, 2005.

But of course I have to acknowledge: Cartoons can be offensive. Indeed, they can. But so can the truth. Quite often cartoons have to be offensive to be good.

In fact, the 12 Mohammed-cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten are very different, both in the way they are depicting the prophet, and in whom they are targeting for satire. As you may know, one of the cartoons makes fun of me and the cultural department of Jyllands-Posten, calling us a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.

Ironically, the artist behind this harmless cartoon was one of two cartoonists who about two weeks after the publication of the 12 cartoons had to go into hiding after the police received notice that a young Muslim in possession of private addresses of the two cartoonists and armed with a weapon was on his way to Copenhagen. Fortunately, he was taken into custody and the the two cartoonists and their families could return to their houses.

Though conspiracy theorists have been working over time to build an arresting narrative around the history of the the publication of the cartoons and what followed, I can assure you, that I didn’t hire this young man to take revenge for the insult.

Anyway, by now I have been named a Ukrainian jew and a North African jew leading a zionist conspiracy to inflame turmoil in the Muslim world. Others have called be a CIA-agent, and, really creatively I must say, the late ex-KGB-officer Alexander Litvinenko (peace be upon him) turned me into a Russian spy operating through my father-in-law, allegedly a retired KGB-general, who developed the idea of publication of the Mohammed cartoons as a plot to drive out the US from the Middle East.
Maybe that’s the reason why the Bush White House, initially, deplored the publication of the cartoons.

Though people take cartoons seriously, some would say too seriously, a cartoon is not a piece of objective journalism committed to the most accurate and balanced presentation of the news. You cannot do fact checking on a cartoon. It works through exaggeration, caricature, satire. It distorts reality, manipulates reality, makes fun of it, offends, insults and ridicules. It’s a comment on what is going on in the news, not in the form of written or spoken language, but as a visual image.
Or as Herb Block put it so eloquently (I stole this quote from the exhibtion we attented yesterday at the Washington Post):
”The political cartoon is not a news story, and not a oil portrait, but essentially a means for poking fun, for punctuating pomposity and for offering criticism.”

Some 15 years ago Queen Margrethe II of Denmark paid an official visit to the United States of America. The National Press Club here in Washington – in fact the very building we find ourselves in – presented an exhibition with cartoons dealing with the Queen and the royal family.

Before going to Washington her Majesty invited the chairman of the Danish Cartoonist Association to her Palace in the center of Copenhagen. They had coffee, and the chairman showed the Queen the cartoons that was going to be part of the exibition in Washington.
She turned out to know all the cartoonists by name. The chairman was surprised by her detailed knowledge of the tradition of cartoons in Denmark, and asked her about it.

Not without proud she pointed to her father, the late King Frederik 9, who started his work day piling through the papers and checking the cartoons.

A few days later the Queen was asked at a press conference in Washington, if she didn’t find all these cartoons making fun of her and her family insulting and unfit for publication. ”They cannot have been published, can’t they?”, inquired a reporter.

”Oh, yes,” the Queen replied, ”all of them have been published, and I love every one of them.”

Well, this was the kind of tradition of humor and satire that served as the context for the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, a tradition that we danes are proud of and eager to keep alive. But I don’t know if we will succeed in a world calling for ”responsible speech” (which, if this comes true, by the way means that none of you will have a job) and demands for protection of religion as if the Almighty cannot take care of himself. This sounds, frankly, a little contradictory to me.

Nevertheless, Amnesty International, the government funded Danish Center for Human Rights and other good hearted people in December 2005 invited me to a public debate about the Mohammed cartoons with the intriguing title ”Victims of Free Speech”. Let me remind you that at the time the cartoonists had already been subject to death threats, Theo van Gogh had been killed in Holland for making a movie insulting Muslim religious sensibilities, the Somalia born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was in hiding for having written the script to the movie, and in the UK a play had to be taken off due to threats of burning down the theater and harming the author, who allegedly had insulted Sikh-traditions. Also in the UK the BBC was attacked by angry Christians for broadcasting ”Jerry Springer, the Opera”. These were some of the issues I thought we were going to debate.
How wrong I was.
The Human Righteous crowd insisted on talking about how the use of free speech creates victims, so you cartoonists better watch out. Do not create victims of free speech. I am sure quite a few people would appreciate it. The reasoning behind this kind of debate seems to be:
If you issue death threats, intimidate, scream loud and call for clamp down on speech and at the same time insist that you are very offended, then you are a victim, a victim of free speech. If, on the other hand, you are a cartoonist, you are a potential perpetrator of a crime.

Well, victims of free speech, how orwellian can it be? Why not ”victims of democracy”? Or ”victims of the welfare state”? Or of ”free education”?

Maybe I have provided you with an idea for next year’s convention of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, but, to be honest, I hope not. Thank you for your attention.

A few weeks ago I had coffee in Copenhagen with two nice individuals from RAND Corporation, the US government funded think tank. One of them, Cheryl Benard, is involved in network building among moderate or secular Muslims. She turned out to be quite optimistic on behalf of the future of moderate Muslims, and renounced the common held view that
1) Moderate Muslims don’t exist.
2) And if they exist they are lonely, isolated individuals with no support in the Muslim world.
3) And if they exist and are being listened to in parts of the Muslim world, they don’t want our help because it will discredit them in the eyes of their fellow citizens.

”It’s my impression that all three statements are wrong,” Cheryl told me.
The next day she left a book for me at the desk of her hotel. The title is ”Building Moderate Muslim Networks” (RAND Center for Middle East Public Policy), and it is coauthored by Cheryl Benard, Angel Rabasa, Lowell H. Schwartz and Peter Sickle. I found it very illuminating and applicable in practise, and here are some of the points.

Inside government there is a huge bulk of knowledge about how to fight a totalitarian ideology that is not being used. Nevertheless, some of the lessons from the Cold War need to be put to use in the war on Islamism. There are obvious parallels between the two. As in the late 1940s, the West is confronted with a new and confusing geopolitical environment with new threats, an ideologically driven global jihadist movement striking with acts of mass-casualty terrorism and seeking to overturn the international order. During the early Cold War years there was a recognition that the US and its allies were engaged in an ideological conflict between liberal democracy and Communism, a battle for the hearts and minds of audiences behind the Iron Curtain and in Western Europe. Today the US is involved in a war in which ultimate victory will achieved only ”when extremist ideologies are discredited in the eyes of their host populations and tacit supporters.” (Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 2006).

US and Western network-building efforts are now regarded as one of the key reasons for the victory in the Cold War, but there is currently no explicit policy to build moderate Muslim networks in the Muslim world and the West. Several factors contributed to the succes of anti-communist networking during the Cold War:
1) The development of democratic networks was closely tied to a grand strategy.
2) Networking efforts tapped into existing movements and organizations that already existed in Western Europe.
3) The US government managed to strike a balance that allowed the groups it supported a high level of independence.

The authors present a road map for moderate network building in the Muslim world. Unfortuntely, most governments have not been able to work out a clear set of criterias to distinguish moderate Muslims from radicals or islamists, and in several cases governments have provided islamists with funding and given them status as partners for government.
How do we identify moderate Muslims?
Moderate Muslims are those who share the key dimensions of democratic culture. These include support for democacy and internationally recognized human rights (including equality between men and women and freedom of worship), respect for diversity, acceptance of secular law, and opposition to terrorism and other illegitimate forms of violence.
The dividing line between moderate Muslims and radical Islamists in countries with legal systems based on those of the West is whether the sharia should apply. Men and women, believers and unbelievers do not have equal rights under the sharia. Moderates respect rights of women and religious minorities, They defend women’s right of access to education, and health services, and right to full participation in the political process, including the right to hold political offices.
It is not enough for a group to declare itself democratic in the sense of favoring elections as the vehicle for establishing government – as in the case of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Who are the potential partners for networking building among moderate Muslims?
Secularists, liberal Muslims and moderate traditionalists and Sufis. Among the secularists there are three groups, liberal secularists, authoritarian secularists (Ba’athists, Nasserites, Neo-Communists) and anti-clericalists (Ataturkist). Liberal Muslims are stronger outside the Arab world, and therefore the West should put more effort in promoting the flow of ideas from countries like Indonesia in South East Asia and more generally from the West to the Arab world in stead of spending most of its ressources on the Middle East.

Why in the West, asks Malaysian intellectual Chandra Muzaffar.
”Because in the West you’re challenged intellectually. You have to define your position. You have to try to understand some of your own precepts and principles. And that sort of intellectual challenge is very, very important. It’s something that is not happening in the Muslim majority societies where you have this sort of complacent attitude, where thought has stultified. You find that creativity is no longer there. It’s all ossified. But in the West, it’s different. They’re challenged; they’ll have to respond to it.”

The increasing weight of Europe’s Muslim populations at the point of encounter between the West and and Muslim world makes moderate European Muslims a critical component of the authors proposed initiative to build moderate Muslim networks.
There are three competing viewpoints among European Muslims:
Some believe that the natural development for European Muslims is to become fully integrated members of European societies and of Western modernity.
Other European Muslims believe that, while Muslims should integrate to the extent that they obtain education, enter the workplace and participate in public life, ideally they would maintain a distinct identity. Their profession of Islam should be visible to others, and Europe should make suitable adaptations to accomodate it.
The least integration-minded position holds that Muslims should remain a distinct community following their traditional practices and religious laws (sharia), which should be implemented in parallel with Western legal codes.
While those among the first current of opinion and some adherents of the second favor the Europeanization of Islam, the third current looks forward to the Islamization of Europe.
From the standpoint of the authors, the partners for moderate Muslim networks are adherents of the first two approaches, though each of the three positions are being considered moderate by the standards of European governments and elites, including salafist movements with links to extremist groups. This is for example the case with the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, the Islamic Society of Denmark and the Muslim Council of Britain.