Flemming rose why i published those cartoons

As a consequence, the Muhammad cartoons are not just about satire; they're about one of the fundamental pillars of a democracy. In that sense, the cartoons serve as an act of recognition of Muslims as equal citizens in Western democracies. They stress the point that a secular democracy doesn't ask more of Muslims and it doesn't ask less.

It asks of Muslims exactly the same as of any other group in society. Muslims aren't strangers or guests; they are here to stay. The Muhammad cartoons are in fact more innocuous than what's been done to the symbols of Christianity. After the killings in Paris and Copenhagen and after a hopefully growing understanding that the primary victims of Islamist extremists are individual Muslims who are prevented from exercising their rights, it seems to me that the former narrative has been more difficult to sustain.

It doesn't square with the fact that powerful and influential media in the West have subjected themselves to an unwritten blasphemy law. A Muslim can belong to a minority in one place but be the one who decides what is right and wrong in another. Some Muslims have been very clear that they don't feel offended as members of a marginalized minority. It made a huge impression on me when I read the testimony in court by Mohammad Bouyeri, the young Islamist extremist who in killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Speaking to van Gogh's mother, Bouyeri said :. You should know that I acted out of my own conviction and not because I hated your son for being Dutch or for having offended me as a Moroccan. I never felt offended. And I did not know your son. I cannot accuse him of being a hypocrite.

I know he was not, and I know he was true to his own personal conviction. So the whole story about me feeling offended as a Moroccan or because he had insulted me is nonsense. I acted on the basis of my belief. What is more, I said that I would have done exactly the same thing if it had been my own father or brother.

It's clear that Islam has a problem with blasphemy and apostasy. Even though the majority of Muslims denounce terrorism and killing in the name of religion, blasphemy -- the crime of Theo van Gogh, Lars Vilks, Kurt Westergaard and the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo -- and apostasy -- the crime of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie -- are perceived by hundreds of millions of Muslims as capital offenses that deserve the harshest punishment.

I saw life through the lens of the countercultural turmoil, adopting both the hippie pose and the political superiority complex of my generation. I and my high school peers believed that the West was imperialistic and racist. It took me only 10 months as a young student in the Soviet Union in to realize what a world without private property looks like, although many years had to pass until the full implications of the central Marxist dogma became clear to me. That experience was the beginning of a long intellectual journey that has thus far culminated in the reactions to the Muhammed cartoons.

Politically, I came of age in the Soviet Union. I returned there in to spend 11 years as a foreign correspondent. Through close contact with courageous dissidents who were willing to suffer and go to prison for their belief in the ideals of Western democracy, I was cured of my wooly dreams of idealistic collectivism.

I had a strong sense of the high price my friends were willing to pay for the very freedoms that we had taken for granted in high school -- but did not grasp as values inherent in our civilization: freedom of speech, religion, assembly and movement. Justice and equality implies equal opportunity, I learned, not equal outcome. Now, in Europe's failure to grapple realistically with its dramatically changing demographic picture, I see a new parallel to that Cold War journey.

Europe's left is deceiving itself about immigration, integration and Islamic radicalism today the same way we young hippies deceived ourselves about Marxism and communism 30 years ago. It is a narrative of confrontation and hierarchy that claims that the West exploits, abuses and marginalizes the Islamic world.

Left-wing intellectuals have insisted that the Danes were oppressing and marginalizing Muslim immigrants. This view comports precisely with the late Edward Said's model of Orientalism, which argues that experts on the Orient and the Muslim world have not depicted it as it is but as some dreaded "other," as exactly the opposite of ourselves -- that should therefore to be rejected.

The West, in this narrative, is democratic, the East is despotic. We are rational, they are irrational. This kind of thinking gave birth to a distorted approach to immigration in countries like Denmark. Left-wing commentators decided that Denmark was both racist and Islamophobic.

Therefore, the chief obstacle to integration was not the immigrants' unwillingness to adapt culturally to their adopted country there are , Danish Muslims now ; it was the country's inherent racism and anti-Muslim bias.

A cult of victimology arose and was happily exploited by clever radicals among Europe's Muslims, especially certain religious leaders like Imam Ahmad Abu Laban in Denmark and Mullah Krekar in Norway. Mullah Krekar -- a Kurdish founder of Ansar al Islam who this spring was facing an expulsion order from Norway -- called our publication of the cartoons "a declaration of war against our religion, our faith and our civilization.

Our way of thinking is penetrating society and is stronger than theirs. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the prophet and in whom they target On occasion, Jyllands-Posten has refused to print satirical cartoons of Jesus, but not because it applies a double standard.

In fact, the same cartoonist who drew the image of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban drew a cartoon with Jesus on the cross having dollar notes in his eyes and another with the star of David attached to a bomb fuse. Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces.

The museum explained that it did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. A few months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg, Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation from the Koran.

Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive coverage of Islam.

So, over two weeks we witnessed a half-dozen cases of self-censorship, pitting freedom of speech against the fear of confronting issues about Islam. This was a legitimate news story to cover, and Jyllands-Posten decided to do it by adopting the well-known journalistic principle: Show it, don't tell it.

I wrote to members of the association of Danish cartoonists asking them "to draw Muhammad as you see him. Twelve out of 25 active members responded. We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions.

And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the prophet and in whom they target. One cartoon makes fun of Jyllands-Posten, portraying its cultural editors as a bunch of reactionary provocateurs.

Another suggests that the children's writer who could not find an illustrator for his book went public just to get cheap publicity. A third puts the head of the anti-immigration Danish People's Party in a lineup, as if she is a suspected criminal.

One cartoon -- depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban -- has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist.

I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an inherent characteristic of the prophet.