No laughing matter
Michael Vestey
Radio News moved smartly last week to mount a special programme about Denmark and the carefully planned Muslim protests against cartoons depicting Mohammed that were first published there. Malcolm Brabant was the presenter of Denmark: In the Eye of the Cartoon Storm (Thursday), which replaced that week’s edition of Open Country. He found plenty of evidence to show how the protest was stirred up by, among others, a rabblerousing Palestinian imam at Copenhagen’s mosque, the Islamic Cultural Centre, four months after the cartoons were first published without fuss in a Danish newspaper. Clearly, Middle Eastern countries needed that time to churn out enough Danish flags to distribute and burn.
The cartoons showed Mohammed with a bomb on his head and also telling a suicide bomber to stop as he was running out of virgins. The controversy flared up after a delegation of imams visited the Middle East to complain to political and religious leaders about the cartoons. A spokeswoman for the group had the nerve to say that they were trying to contain the problem, but Brabant countered by telling her the group had had no intention of containing it, they’d tried to explode it. He pointed out that they had taken with them not just the cartoons but also other inflammatory images showing Mohammed as a pig and a paedophile that hadn’t been published in newspapers. ‘You just wanted to stir it up and cause trouble,’ he told her, which she wasn’t able to answer satisfactorily. It seems the Copenhagen imam sounds like a moderate Muslim in Denmark, but, according to a Muslim member of the Danish parliament who now needs two bodyguards, when the imam goes on Al-Jazeera TV he tells his audience in the Middle East in Arabic that the Danish are going to burn their Koran and their mosques. It seems that after years of uncontrolled immigration Denmark now has 200,000 Muslims, mostly from Turkey, a salutary warning to the EU, if one were needed, not to admit Turkey to full membership. They form almost 4 per cent of the population, which is only 5.4 million in total. A Muslim woman Brabant spoke to said she’d left Iran 20 years ago because she didn’t have freedom of speech there. In the same breath, though, she said the cartoons had been wrong as they didn’t represent such freedom but were ‘a joke about religion’. Brabant pointed out that making jokes was a Western characteristic. But she persisted, saying that making a caricature of Mohammed was not freedom of speech. It seemed to fall into an incomprehensible category of its own. Another Muslim concurred, saying that over the centuries many people had drawn pictures of the prophet, but they hadn’t put a bomb on his head — that wasn’t freedom of speech but humiliation. A Danish-born Muslim said she understood the need to make jokes, but offending people wasn’t a joke. It’s strange how so many Muslims simply cannot make the connection between the cartoons and freedom of speech, including some of those demonstrating at that unnecessary and pointless rally in London last weekend organised by extremists, especially as no one had had the courage to print the cartoons here.
A prominent Danish businessman said it had been a pan-European protest planned and orchestrated from Saudi Arabia. Denmark was considered the weak link in the EU because 25 years ago the Saudi regime persuaded the Danish government to stop an ITV drama documentary called Death of a Princess from being shown on television. It was the only European country to do so. The film exposed the cruelty of Saudi society, the public execution of a woman who’d had an adulterous affair, and the Saudis were desperate to stop themselves being portrayed as the barbarians they were. Pressure was even applied in Britain but there would have been uproar if it had been censored. They knew the Danish government would cave in if pressure was applied strongly enough. However, there wasn’t much it could do about the cartoons.
The biggest mistake, he thought, was to allow too many Muslims in without qualifications, and because of what he called the country’s ‘fantastic welfare package’ many were happy to stay out of the labour market. Now, though, and rather belatedly, Denmark has the toughest immigration rules in the EU. This programme was a useful reminder of how impossible it is to balance Western freedoms with Islam, as even moderate Muslims feel obliged to complain about the cartoons. How long will it be before the hand-wringing Archbishop of Canterbury starts apologising on behalf of Denmark? He seems to have apologised for everything else in history.
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