[Reader-list] Why I published the M cartoons

[Yousuf]

May 31, 2006, New York Times

Why I Published the Muhammad Cartoons

By Flemming Rose

European political correctness allows Muslims to
resist integration, argues
the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten. Instead,
Muslims should be treated
just like all Europeans -- including being subject to
satire. He argues that
publishing the caricatures was an act of "inclusion,
not exclusion."

The worldwide furor unleashed by the cartoons of the
Prophet Muhammed that I
published last September in Jyllands-Posten, the
Danish newspaper where I
work, was both a surprise and a tragedy, especially
for those directly
affected by it. Lives were lost, buildings were
torched and people were
driven into hiding.

And yet the unbalanced reactions to the
not-so-provocative caricatures --
loud denunciations and even death threats toward us,
but very little outrage
toward the people who attacked two Danish Embassies --
unmasked unpleasant
realities about Europe's failed experiment with
multiculturalism. It's time
for the Old Continent to face facts and make some
profound changes in its
outlook on immigration, integration and the coming
Muslim demographic surge.
After decades of appeasement and political
correctness, combined with
growing fear of a radical minority prepared to commit
serious violence,
Europe's moment of truth is here.

Europe today finds itself trapped in a posture of
moral relativism that is
undermining its liberal values. An unholy
three-cornered alliance between
Middle East dictators, radical imams who live in
Europe and Europe's
traditional left wing is enabling a politics of
victimology. This politics
drives a culture that resists integration and
adaptation, perpetuates
national and religious differences and aggravates such
debilitating social
ills as high immigrant crime rates and entrenched
unemployment.

As one who once championed the utopian state of
multicultural bliss, I think
I know what I'm talking about. I was raised on the
ideals of the 1960s, in
the midst of the Cold War. 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. We
analyzed decaying Western
civilization through the texts of Marx and Engels and
lionized John Lennon's
beautiful but stupid tune about an ideal world without
private property:
"Imagine no possessions/ I wonder if you can/ No need
for greed or hunger/ A
brotherhood of man/ Imagine all the people/ Sharing
all the world."

It took me only 10 months as a young student in the
Soviet Union in 1980-81
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
1990 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 200,000 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. This
causes hate in the
Western way of thinking; as the losing side, they
commit violence."

The role of victim is very convenient because it frees
the self-declared
victim from any responsibility, while providing a
posture of moral
superiority. It also obscures certain inconvenient
facts that might suggest
a different explanation for the lagging integration of
some immigrant
groups -- such as the relatively high crime rates, the
oppression of women
and a tradition of forced marriage.

Dictatorships in the Middle East and radical imams
have adopted the jargon
of the European left, calling the cartoons racist and
Islamophobic. When
Westerners criticize their lack of civil liberties and
the oppression of
women, they say we behave like imperialists. They have
adopted the rhetoric
and turned it against us.

These events are occurring against the disturbing
backdrop of increasingly
radicalized Muslims in Europe. Muhammed Atta, the 9/11
ringleader, became a
born-again Muslim after he moved to Europe. So did the
perpetrators behind
the bombings in Madrid and London. The same goes for
Mohammed Bouyeri, the
young Muslim who slaughtered filmmaker Theo van Gogh
in Amsterdam. Europe,
not the Middle East, may now be the main breeding
ground for Islamic
terrorism.

Lessons from the United States

What's wrong with Europe? For one thing, Europe's
approach to immigration
and integration is rooted in its historic experience
with relatively
homogeneous cultures. In the United States one's
definition of nationality
is essentially political; in Europe it is historically
cultural. I am a Dane
because I look European, speak Danish, descend from
centuries of other
Scandinavians. But what about the dark, bearded new
Danes who speak Arabic
at home and poor Danish in the streets? We Europeans
must make a profound
cultural adjustment to understand that they, too, can
be Danes.

Another great impediment to integration is the
European welfare state.
Because Europe's highly developed, but increasingly
unaffordable, safety
nets provide such strong unemployment insurance and
not enough incentive to
work, many new immigrants go straight onto the dole.

While it can be argued that the fast-growing community
of about 20 million
Muslim immigrants in Europe is the equivalent of
America's new Hispanic
immigrants, the difference in their productivity and
prosperity is
staggering. An Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development study
in 1999 showed that while immigrants in the United
States are almost equal
to native-born workers as taxpayers and contributors
to American prosperity,
in Denmark there is a glaring gap of 41 percent
between the contributions of
the native-born and of the immigrants. In the United
States, a laid-off
worker gets an average of 32 percent compensation for
his former wages in
welfare services; in Denmark the figure is 81 percent.
A culture of welfare
dependency is rife among immigrants, and it is taken
for granted.

What to do? Obviously, we can never return to the
comfortable monocultures
of old. A demographic revolution is changing the face,
and look, of Europe.
In an age of mass migration and the Internet, cheap
air fares and mobile
phones everywhere, cultural pluralism is an
irreversible fact, like it or
not. A nostalgic longing for cultural purity -- racial
purity, religious
purity -- easily descends into ethnic cleansing.

Yet multiculturalism that has all too often become
mere cultural relativism
is an indefensible proposition that often justifies
reactionary and
oppressive practices. Giving the same weight to the
illiberal values of
conservative Islam as to the liberal traditions of the
European
Enlightenment will, in time, destroy the very things
that make Europe such a
desirable target for migration.

Europe must shed the straitjacket of political
correctness, which makes it
impossible to criticize minorities for anything --
including violations of
laws, traditional mores and values that are central to
the European
experience. Two experiences tell the tale for me.

Shortly after the horrific 2002 Moscow musical theater
siege by Chechen
terrorists that left 130 dead, I met with one of my
old dissident friends,
Sergei Kovalev. A hero of the human rights movement in
the old Soviet Union,
Kovalev had long been a defender of the Chechens and a
critic of the Russian
attacks on Chechnya. But after the theater massacre he
refused, as always,
to indulge in politically correct drivel about the
Chechens' just fight for
secession and decolonization. He unhesitatingly
denounced the terrorists,
and insisted that a nation's right to
self-determination did not imply a
free ticket to kill and violate basic individual
rights. For me, it was a
clarifying moment on the dishonesty of identity
politics and the sometime
tyranny of elevating group rights above those of
individuals -- of
justifying the killing of innocents in the name of
some higher cause.

The other experience was a trip I made in the 1990s,
when I was a
correspondent based in the United States, to the
Brighton Beach neighborhood
of Brooklyn, N.Y. There I wrote a story about the
burgeoning, bustling,
altogether vibrant Russian immigrant community that
had arisen there -- a
perfect example of people retaining some of their old
cultural identity
(drinking samovars of tea, playing hours of chess and
attending church)
while quickly taking advantage of America's free and
open capitalism to
establish an economic foothold. I marveled at
America's ability to absorb
newcomers. It was another clarifying moment.

An act of inclusion. Equal treatment is the democratic
way to overcome
traditional barriers of blood and soil for newcomers.
To me, that means
treating immigrants just as I would any other Danes.
And that's what I felt
I was doing in publishing the 12 cartoons of Muhammad
last year. Those
images in no way exceeded the bounds of taste, satire
and humor to which I
would subject any other Dane, whether the queen, the
head of the church or
the prime minister. By treating a Muslim figure the
same way I would a
Christian or Jewish icon, I was sending an important
message: You are not
strangers, you are here to stay, and we accept you as
an integrated part of
our life. And we will satirize you, too. It was an act
of inclusion, not
exclusion; an act of respect and recognition.

Alas, some Muslims did not take it that way -- though
it required a highly
organized campaign, several falsified (and very nasty)
cartoons and several
months of overseas travel for the aggrieved imams to
stir up an
international reaction.

Maybe Europe needs to take a leaf -- or a whole book
-- from the American
experience. In order for new Europe of many cultures
that is somehow a
single entity to emerge, in a manner similar to the
experience of the United
States, both sides will have to make an effort -- the
native-born and the
newly arrived.

For the immigrants, the expectation that they not only
learn the host
language but also respect their new countries'
political and cultural
traditions is not too much to demand, and some
stringent (maybe too
stringent) new laws are being passed to force that. At
the same time,
Europeans must show a willingness to jettison
entrenched notions of blood
and soil and accept people from foreign countries and
cultures as just what
they are, the new Europeans.

Flemming Rose is culture editor of Jyllands-Posten,
the largest newspaper in
Denmark.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/world/europe/31spiegel.html?_r=1&oref=slog
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