Yesterday the Vatican joined the al-Azhar university in Cairo in condemning the republication of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard’s depiction of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban, but the Catholic state and the supreme institution of Islam in the Sunni world didn’t say a word about the foiled plot to kill Westergaard, who has been in hiding since November last year.

”Both sides vehemently denounce the reprinting of the offensive cartoon and the attack on Islam and its prophet,” the two sides said in a joint statement according to IslamOnline.

The cartoon was republished by 17 danish newspapers two weeks ago in an act of solidarity with the 72 year old cartoonist.

”We call for the respect of faiths, religious holy books and religious symbols,” read the statement.

”Freedom of expression should not become a pretext to insult religions and defaming religious sanctities.”

I guess the denunciation was heard in the kindergarten, where Kurt Westergaard’s wife Gitte is working. Today she received a call from the director asking her not to show up at work. A spokesman for the authorities in charge of child care in the county said that the decision to kick out Ms. Westergaard was made after several parents expressed worries for the safety of their kids.

”I am angry, dissappointed and sad. The threats are against my husband. There is no security problem concerning me,” Gitte Westergaard told Jyllands-Posten.

”I understand that some parents may feel insecure, but I would never work at a kindergarten, if I had the slightest suspicion or knowledge that this would represent a risk to the kids or my colleagues.”

Congratulations to the Vatican and Al-Azhar. This kindergarten have really shown them the kind of respect they are craving for. It’s the hells angels’ code of ethics: If you don’t respect me I’ll kill you. Or if you don’t respect me I’ll scare the hell out of anymore who’s in touch with you so that they will cut off any contact with you. And it’s working: due to security concerns the Westergaards were kicked out of the Radisson hotel in Aarhus last week.

And by the way: al-Azhar is a university practicing institutional apartheid. The institution is banned for Jews and Copts, not only the department of theology, but also medicine, economics and agriculture. And speaking about offending religious sensibilities: al-Azhar has shown no willingness to abandon the part of the sharia providing Muslims with the obligation to insult non-Muslims’ religious feelings, while at the same time insisting that non-Muslims offending Muslims’ religious sensibilities should be punished.

How does this correspond with the joint declaration?

Former US President Bill Clinton visited Pakistan a week ago. A few days after Danish police arrested three young Muslim men who were plotting to kill 73-year old cartoonist Kurt Westergaard Clinton said to Pakistani tv:

“I strongly disagree with both the creation and publication of cartoons that were considered blasphemous to devout Muslims around the world because they depicted the Prophet. And I thought it was a mistake. I had no objection to Muslims throughout the world demonstrating their convictions in a peaceful way. But I thought it was also a great opportunity, which I fear has been squandered, to build bridges, because I can tell you that most people in the United States deeply respect Islam - it is the fastest growing religion in America - as do most people in Europe, and most people in Denmark. We live in societies where people are free to say the wrong things as well as the right things, but I would not be surprised if the person who drew those cartoons and the newspaper publisher who decided to print them did not even know that it was considered by Muslims to be blasphemous to have any kind of personal depiction of the Prophet.”

Not a word of condemnation of the murder plot against the Danish cartoonist, not a word about Pakistan’s and other members og the Organization of Islamic Countries’ (OIC) campaign in the UN to kill free speech, not a word in defense of minorities in Pakistan that are being oppressed in the name of Islam.

And as if Pakistan had been inspired by Clinton’s disgraceful behaviour the Musharraf-government has ordered all internet-providers to block access to YouTube because it carries ”blasphemeous content, videos and documents” insulting Islam. Other government officials say that YouTube has been blocked because it contains the Muhammed cartoons.

The Arab League has also learned a lesson from the former leader of the free world. The member states have agreed that governments in the Arab world should have the right to close down tv-stations if religious and political figures are being ciriticised. The proposal was put forward by the Egyptian government. Only Qatar and Libanon voted against the propasal.

“We see insults around the clock,” said Egyptian minister of Information, Anas el-Fiqi.

Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Article 19, an organization that is defending free speech around the world, told Jyllands-Posten that it is a troubling development.

“It contributes to a climate of fear and self censorchip. It’s because Arab leaders perceive critical tv-shows as a threat to their ability to control people.”

This isn’t the first time Bill Clinton made outrageous comments on the cartoon crisis. On a trip to Qatar in February 2006 he compared the Danish Muhammed cartoons to anti-semitic cartoons.

“In Europe, most of the struggles we’ve had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism,” he said.

“None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic backgrounds, and different religions… there was an appalling example in northern Europe, in Denmark… these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam.”

Well, I am pretty sure that Clinton never saw the Danish cartoons. The one he saw on BBC, was a photo manipulation from a pig contest in France that Danish imams presented as a cartoon depicting the prophet as a pig. It was a fake.

And the fact of the matter is that there is a fundamental difference between cartoons ridiculing religion and cartoons attacking an ethnic group. Religions like political ideogies constitute a set of ideas that need to be challenged. In fact, I am convinced that people should never respect ideas, they should respect individuals that deserves it. Ideas do not enjoy human rights, people do.

Mr. Clinton doesn’t seem to get the difference.

Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, the former deputy editor of the Belarussian newspaper Zgoda, was freed from prison yesterday.

Sdvizhkov had been sentenced to three years in prison on January 18 for having republished the Danish Muhammed cartoons (article 130, 2 of the criminal code, ”incitement of racial, ethnic and religious hatred”).

The newspaper was closed two days before the presidential election in the spring of 2006. It was perceived as a way to silence the opposition.

Sdvizhkov had been in prison since November 2007. He was arrested upon returning from his hideout in Russia, where he had been living since the indicment against him. Sdvizhkov is head of the Belarussian Social Democratic Party that founded the newspaper Zgoda.

Sdvizhkov’s lawyer Maya Aleksandrova told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the decision by the Supreme Court to release the former editor was based on the ”extraordinary circumstances” of the case. The Supreme Court reduced the sentence from three years to three months.

”I was asked to leave my cell with all my belongings. I thought they might have decided to transport me to the (penal) colony. Later, it became clear that I was being processed for release,” Sdvizhkov told RFE/RL.

The decision to free Sdvizhkov came after the European Parliament on February 21 adopted a resolution calling on the Belarussian authorities to release Zdvizhkov and former presidential candidate Aleksandr Kozulin, who is serving a 5½ year sentence for organizing anti-government demonstrations in the wake of 2006 presidential elections.

By the way: Isn’t that what a presidential candidate from the opposition is supposed to to?

Zdvizhkov lost half his teeth in prison and his hearing and sight have deteriorated. Sdvizhkov said that he didn’t feel well and would focus on his physical recovery.

Zdvizhkov is one of four political prisoners in Belarus who have been released from prison within the past few weeks.

February 15 opposition leader and former MP Andrei Klimov was released. Since August last year he had been serving a two-year sentence in jail. He was convicted for having insulted the president and called for a revolution.

Two student activists, Artur Finkevich and Zmitser Dashkevich, have also been released from a detention facility.

Egypt has banned an edition of the Wall Street Journal because it ran an illustration of the prophet Muammed that the Egyptian authorities found offensive.

On February 15 the Journal published my commentary to the foiled murder plot against catoonist Kurt Westergaard who has been in hiding for the past three months. The oped was illustrated with a photograph showing the front pages of Danish newspapers that republished Westergaard’s cartoon depicting Muhammed with a bomb in his turban. The cartoon was on many of the papers’s front page, so readers were able to identify it in the Journal.

According to a statement on the Journal’s website no one told the newspaper about the decision by the Egypt government.

“We have not received any notification from the Egyptian government about its banning of sales of the Journal in Egypt,” a spokesman said.

Brand Republic reports from London that the Observer and two German newspapers, Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine, also have been removed from newsstands in Egypt.

Egypt’s information minister said in a statement published by the Middle East News Agency:

“Any newspaper or magazine which publishes anything offensive to the prophet and reprints the offensive caricatures of the prophet or anything offensive to the three heavenly religions will be banned.”

I remind you that an Egyptian newspaper in October 2005 published eight of Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons without any reaction from the authorities or the public.

In fact, this is the first time one of the major American newspapers showed Westergaard’s cartoon. Great! All the news that fit to print.

My comment to the fate of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was published in the Wall Street Journal last Friday. Here it is:

Free Speech and Radical Islam

At a lunch last year celebrating his 25th anniversary with Jyllands-Posten, Kurt Westergaard told an anecdote. During World War II Pablo Picasso met a German officer in southern France, and they got into a conversation. When the German officer figured out whom he was talking to he said:

“Oh, you are the one who created Guernica?” referring to the famous painting of the German bombing of a Basque town by that name in 1937.

Picasso paused for a second, and replied, “No, it wasn’t me, it was you.”

For the past three months Mr. Westergaard and his wife have been on the run. Mr. Westergaard did the most famous of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 — the one depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban. The cartoon was a satirical comment on the fact that some Muslims are committing terrorist acts in the name of Islam and the prophet. Tragically, Mr. Westergaard’s fate has proven the point of his cartoon: In the early hours of Tuesday morning Danish police arrested three men who allegedly had been plotting to kill him.

In the past few days 17 Danish newspapers have published Mr. Westergaard’s cartoon, which is as truthful as Picasso’s painting. My colleagues at Jyllands-Posten and I understand that the cartoon may be offensive to some people, but sometimes the truth can be very offensive. As George Orwell put it in the suppressed preface to “Animal Farm”: “If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Sadly, the plot to kill Mr. Westergaard is not an isolated story, but part of a broader trend that risks undermining free speech in Europe and around the world. Consider the following recent events: In Oslo a gallery has censored three small watercolor paintings, showing the head of the prophet Muhammad on a dog’s body, by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been under police protection since the fall of 2007. In Holland the municipal museum in The Hague recently refused to show photos by the Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera of gay men wearing the masks of the prophet Muhammad and his son Ali; Ms. Hera has received several death threats and is in hiding. In Belarus an editor has been sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp after republishing some of Jyllands-Posten’s Muhammad cartoons. In Egypt bloggers are in jail after having “insulted Islam.” In Afghanistan the 23-year-old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death because he distributed “blasphemous” material about the mistreatment of women in Islam. And in India the Bengal writer Taslima Nasreen is in a safe house after having been threatened by people who don’t like her books.

Every one of the above cases speaks to the same problem: a global battle for the right to free speech. The cases are different, and you can’t compare the legal systems in Egypt and Norway, but the justifications for censorship and self-censorship are similar in different parts of the world: Religious feelings and taboos need to be treated with a kind of sensibility and respect that other feelings and ideas cannot command.

This position boils down to a simple rule: If you respect my taboo, I’ll respect yours. That was the rule of the game during the Cold War until people like Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakharov and other dissenting voices behind the Iron Curtain insisted on another rule: It is not cultures, religions or political systems that enjoy rights. Human beings enjoy rights, and certain principles like the ones embedded in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are universal.

Unfortunately, misplaced sensitivity is being used by tyrants and fanatics to justify murder and silence criticism. Right now the Organization of Islamic Countries is conducting a successful campaign at the United Nations to rewrite international human-rights standards to curtail the right to free speech. Last year the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted a resolution against “defamation of religion,” calling on governments around the world to clamp down on cartoonists, writers, journalists, artists and dissidents who dare to speak up.

In the West there is a lack of clarity on these issues. People suggest that Salman Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen and Kurt Westergaard bear a certain amount of responsibility for their fate. They don’t understand that by doing so they tacitly endorse attacks on dissenting voices in parts of the world where no one can protect them.

We need a global movement to fight blasphemy and other insult laws, and the European Union should lead the way by removing them. Europe should make it clear that democracies will protect their citizens if they say something that triggers threats and intimidation.

Early Tuesday morning, Danish police arrested several people with a Muslim background suspected of conspiring to kill Kurt Westergaard, a Danish cartoonist with Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten.

A formal statement by the police setting out details of the action is expected within the next few hours.

Kurt Westergaard is one of the 12 cartoonists who on 30 September 2005 published cartoons of Muslim prophet Mohammed.

The group arrested includes Danish as well as foreign citizens. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service have followed the group for months.

The cartoons and an explanatory article led, as is well known, to the so-called Mohammed crisis involving violent demonstrations, the boycott of Danish goods and the burning of Danish embassies.

Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon depicting the prophet wearing a bomb turban with a lit fuse attracted particular attention. What the cartoonist wanted to say with his cartoon was that many people exploit the prophet to legitimize terror. However, the cartoon was widely seen as a depiction of the prophet as a terrorist.

Statement by Carsten Juste, Editor-in-Chief of Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, overall content responsibility under Danish media laws:

“Deeply worried and for several months, the management of Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten have followed the discreet efforts by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service to protect Kurt Westergaard from concrete murder threats. The arrests have hopefully thwarted the murder plans. We sympathize with Kurt Westergaard and his family who are forced to live under unreasonable pressure. It is appalling that as a reward a man who to the best of his ability goes about his work and carries it out in accordance with Danish law, the Danish media ethics code and Danish media traditions was demonized and had his life threatened. We are grateful to the Danish authorities for protecting our colleague competently and professionally.”

Statement by cartoonist Kurt Westergaard:

“Of course I fear for my life after the Danish Security and Intelligence Service informed me of the concrete plans of certain people to kill me. However, I have turned fear into anger and indignation. It has made me angry that a perfectly normal everyday activity which I used to do by the thousand was abused to set off such madness. I have attended to my work and I still do. I could not possibly know for how long I have to live under police protection; I think, however, that the impact of the insane response to my cartoon will last for the rest of my life. It is sad indeed, but it has become a fact of my life. ”

Swedish artist Lars Vilks has been excluded from a new gallery in Oslo. Vilks was invited to present his work at the Lautom Contemporary’s exhibition Where a River Runs North Underground, but when the owner of the gallery Randi Thommessen found out that Vilks intended to put three small watercolor paintings depicting the prophet Muhammed as a dog on view, she asked him to withdraw the paintings. Vilks refused and decided not to participate with other works.

Sappho, an internet magazine devoted to the issue of free speech, has published Randi Thommesen’s letter to Vilks. I believe the letter is important because it provides a rare glimpse into the mind of a gallery owner. Here are the key passages:

Hello Lars

Randi Thommessen
Lautom Contemporary
Oslo

Well, if showing Muhammed drawings isn’t about pushing boundaries…

The Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig wrote The World of Yesterday in a hotel room in New York and New Haven in the summer of 1941 before he set off to Brazil and committed suicide with his wife.

The memoires, an illuminating account of Europe’s road to disaster from the end of the 19th century till the ourbreak of World War II, were published in 1943 after the author’s death.

Zweig left his native Salzburg in 1934 after an intimidating search of his house. He moved to the UK, where he stayed through 1940. As Patrick Wright writes in the Guardian:

”He noted the popularity among the British of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, but did not feel able to speak out against it.”

So he left for the US. Before leaving he made this observation about the British’s press’ coverage of Hitler on the verge of war:

”Hitler only had to utter the word ”peace” in a speech to arouse the newspapers to enthusiasm, to make them forget all his past deeds, and desist from asking why, after all, Germany was arming so madly.”

Patrick Wright compares Zweig’s autobiography with the narcissistic confessions of our time:

”It could scarsely be less like the popular confessions autobiographies of our time, which tend to be softcentred victimologies in which the self is presented as an innocent, childlike entity, while history comes across as a form of absue. Zweig tells his story without vanity or self-pity. He tends to keep a tigtly closed lid on personal feelings, preferring to articulate his life as affected by larger events.”

Incredible but true. Today the president of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, was interviewed on Al-Jazeera, and asked to apologize for the publication of the Danish cartoons back in 2005, though the president of Iceland has nothing to do with Denmark.
Iceland was part of Denmark from the 14th century till 1944. Since then the beautiful island has been an independent country.

The interview with Al-Jazeera took place during an official visit by the president to Qatar, where the tv-station has its headquaters.

Here is what president Grimsson said to radio Iceland about the interview (thanks to Vilhjalm Vilhjalmsson who did the translation from Icelandic into Danish):

”In fact he tried to put pressure on me regarding two things. He asked if I would apologize for the behaviour of the Danes, and if I would ask forgiveness for what they did, this insult, this provocation, this disgrace – he used very strong words – that the Danes had demonstrated with the publication of these caricatures. But of course this was not part of my responsibilities. And to tell you the truth I didn’t expect that this case was still alive and such a hot issue that the most important tv-station in the Arab world found it necessary to raise it during a visit by the president of Iceland, and they wanted to discuss it in detail.”