Denmark used to have a reputation
Jakob Illeborg says Denmark should have known better.
[T]he hawkish approach taken by the Bush administration internationally is reflected by a similarly tough position on Islam and Muslims in Denmark. If the US is leading a global mission, the Danes have been fighting an inner mission, standing up against what is perceived, by some, as a threat to our democracy. Ever since the prophet cartoon crises of 2006 and 2008, Islamist extremists around the world have been threatening bloody revenge on Denmark.
So…maybe that’s why this ‘what’ is perceived by some as a threat to our democracy? Because of the, you know, threats? Of bloody revenge? For some cartoons? Could that have something to do with it? And could there be a way to describe it other than ‘hawkish’?
Monday’s attack, is of course, indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath…The tragedy in Islamabad only confirms the views of those on both sides of the argument…[M]any are proud of Denmark’s newfound role as a “player” in the international conflict between the west and Islam. This is certainly not a position we used to pride ourselves on – nor is it one that is shared by other Scandinavian countries. Denmark used to have a reputation as a liberal, consensus-seeking country advocating calm and reason…
Whereas now it has…what? A reputation as an illiberal country that thinks newspapers should be able to publish innocuous cartoons without triggering death threats and riots and car bombs outside embassies? Is that what he’s saying? Is he saying that publishing the cartoons is not liberal? That it’s anti-liberal?
Tragic.
The author wrote, “The lack of public differentiation between fundamentalist and normal law-abiding Muslims threatens to push Danish Muslims away from a mutual social consensus of respect and tolerance – a dangerous tendency that could lead to more scenarios such as the one in Pakistan.”
If a Danish Muslim is tempted toward violence because of a cartoon, then how is such a person not a fundamentalist to begin with? A “normal, law-abiding” religious moderate is someone who can tolerate their religion being publicly lampooned, vilified, and condemned without inclining toward violence or any sort of forceful suppression. Whoever cannot tolerate this is a foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalist fanatic.
Ah yes but you see we’re supposed to have special standards for Muslims, as if they’re inherently more fragile than other people; that’s the ‘liberal’ way to approach things. Not.
“Jakob Illeborg says Denmark should have known better.”
Bless. His thesis seems to be that we should avoid playing into the hands of extremists by doing exactly what they want. It is successful in much the same way that a seahorse can win the Grand National.
Clearly, we need to have a conversation as to what freedom of the press means. After WWII it was thought appropriate to ban certain kinds of press freedom in Germany and Austria. You can still go to jail for denying the Holocaust. That may have been necessary then, I don’t know, but the limits of press freedom are still uncertain, and it leads to the kind of waffling that we see from Jakob Illeborg. Sometimes press freedom can look like intolerance. Look at Die Stürmer. What are the markers of intolerance as opposed to freedom here?
Well it is tricky. I would rephrase that – it’s not so much that sometimes press freedom can look like intolerance; it’s that free media can be used in ways that stir up hatred to the point of murder and ethnic cleansing and genocide. Not just Die Stürmer but also Radio Mille Collines and Serbian state radio. There are kinds of speech that are not just ‘offensive’ or ‘controversial’ but dangerous – and that’s where things get very difficult.
The Motoons don’t fit that pattern though. To fit the pattern the Motoons would have had to enrage non-Muslims so that they ran out and started murdering Muslims; but needless to say, that’s not what happened.
Illeborg, of course, like other people who scold the cartoonists and Jyllands-Posten for ‘causing’ violence, leaves out the mullahs, the added cartoons, the fake cartoon with the pig snout.
In the case of Die Sturmer, its contents were intolerant, but not its ‘freedom’ (strictly speaking, it was not free, but simply congenial to the state) to publish those contents.
Freedom to publish only tolerant views is no freedom at all.
Yes but tolerance isn’t the only issue, nor is it the really difficult one. What about genuinely dangerous views? Yes, of course knowing which views are genuinely dangerous is part of what makes the issue difficult. But what about them?
I’ve noticed a million times that free speech absolutists never want to discuss that – they want to talk only about ‘intolerant’ or ‘offensive’ or ‘controversial’ views, not views that could get people killed. This always annoys me because it simply avoids the really hard (and very worrying) problems.
I don’t have an answer. I think there is no satisfactory answer – because I don’t think limits on speech are a good thing, but at the same time, I certainly don’t want to say ‘free speech’ about what happened with Radio Mille Collines, and I don’t want to say it about future equivalents either. I don’t have an answer, but I don’t think it helps to go around the question instead of confronting it.
I didn’t mean to suggest that tolerance is the main issue, or that freedom of the press should be absolute, only that the freedom to speak intolerantly is not itself a species of intolerance.
Limiting speach that deliberately provokes harm is arguably justifiable. But we need to be excrutiatingly precise as to the definition of “harm”.
Having my feelings hurt because the religious ideology to which I subscribe and which forms my sense of identity, is criticized, ridiculed, and execrated, is not a sort of harm from which I am entitled to be protected.
NB, yeah. That’s what I think!
I thought you probably didn’t mean to suggest that, I just wanted to spell it out.
There’s a funny kind of slippage from both directions about all this, in the media and broader ‘discourse’ – on the one hand the harm that speech can do is often limited to ‘offence’ but on the other hand ‘offence’ is taken to be a very serious harm. Both are wrong! Offence is not a serious harm, and it’s also not the worst that speech can do.
The insoluble problem about being precise about harm is that that’s not always possible. On the other hand with Serbian and Rwandan radio the harm that did happen was pretty clearly intended from the outset, as I understand it – the radio was used deliberately to rile people up to attack their neighbours. So maybe it’s not all that hard after all…
Beyond censorship (self administered or otherwise), a compliant, unquestioning media also brings harm. Witness the obseqious, cowed, credulous press in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.
On the limits of free speech. I am with OB here, harm goes way beyond any concept of ‘offence’.