“Denmark’s Cartoon Blowback”

Professor As`ad Abu Khalil memorably named his blog, a refreshingly stimulating and bittersweet antidote to the mainstream American media’s bland coverage of the Middle East and Islam, the "Angry Arab News Service".  Given how much of my blogging has been dedicated of late to this wacky cartoon crisis, I’m starting to wonder if I should follow suit and christen this blog "The Angry Danish American Muslim News Service".  (Finally, a niche where I’m the expert!)  Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, though.

Am a little behind on the news at the moment due to looming deadlines at work and the demoralizing absence of a working PC at home–as the villanous Doctor Zachary Smith used to lament on "Lost in Space", "Oh, the pain!  The pain!"–so I may be blissfully unaware of what the latest developments are, but I did come across an informative article in the latest issue of openDemocracy.net (a publication for which I’ve had the privilege of writing a reasonably well received article a few years back) by Danish academic Uft Hedetoft entitled "Denmark’s cartoon blowback".

A professor at the University of Aalborg in Jyllands-Posten’s backyard and the director of the Academy for Migration Studies, a Danish research center on immigration–which is what the cartoon controversy is all about–with a playful acronym ("AMID"  Get it?), Hedetoft makes some really insightful observations that cut to the heart of the case.  I’m pleased to see a number of parallels between his arguments and mine on this blog, though I’ll leave it to others to decide whether this is a sign of the proverbial "brilliant minds" thinking alike, or the exact opposite.

Here are some passages with my favorite bon mots in bold italics.

The distance from domestic provocation to global outrage is short, as Denmark has found to its surprise and regret in the course of a few short weeks. What the daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten intended as a public demonstration of Danish democracy and the right to free speech – an exemplary case presented to the Muslim minority in Denmark – was suddenly transformed into a major political, diplomatic, and even economic quandary. The cartoon scandal has come home to roost, proving to doubters (and there are many in Denmark) that globalisation is a reality in today’s world and comprises more than economic adaptation to changing external conditions. Danes have been forced to realise – among other sobering lessons – that the immigrant "little brother" on the inside apparently has powerful kith-and-kin on the outside.

Here, he alludes in passing to how globalization is too often discussed in purely economic terms, as if this all where a question of dollars and cents.  This makes it very difficult for Westerners to understand the destructive impact of the economic forces about which corporate-lobbyists-in-journalists’-clothing like Tom Friedman sing hossanas day and night in the "mainstream" media.

The point about kith-and-kin is one that I make, if less elegantly, as well in one of my earlier posts ("Whose fault is the Danish boycott?").   I liken the situation to that of a schoolyard bully who picks on a kid who happens to have a really large family.

Hedetoft continues:

The "cartoon war" is still exacting its cost in lives as well as frayed relationships across the world. Its obscure, local beginnings six months ago are by now familiar. Jyllands-Posten, irked by the fact that a number of Danish cartoonists had refused to contribute drawings of Mohammed to a book on Islam by a controversial Danish writer, decided to remedy this apparent instance of self-censorship by commissioning cartoons of the prophet. It published twelve of these on 30 September 2006.

This is the first time I’ve seen the odious political and ideological baggage of Flemming Rose’s ostensibly innocuous "children’s book" project acknowledged in the English press.  (I’ve provided  background on this children’s book author, Kaare Bluitgen, here and here.)  I’m still surprised by how little attention the fact that one of Mr. Bluitgen’s main claims to fame in Denmark is his unflinching advocacy of, literally, the public desecrecration of the Quran (in this case with menstrual blood) has gotten in the international press.

There was no other substantive context, no thematic or analytic justification, no other narrative, slant, or interpretative framework that might have made them palatable or just somehow reasonable. The message was simple, unadorned, and childishly, defiantly provocative: we publish these because we have a right to do so; the liberty of free speech allows us to offend whoever we like, and the religious sensibility of Danish Muslims has to come to terms with this basic fact of Danish life and values if they want to be accepted and to integrate.

This defence of free speech – testing the limits of Muslim tolerance rather than observing the limits of civility – was portrayed as necessary because this democratic value is allegedly under threat from Islamic communities wanting to curtail democracy, to impose a different culture on Denmark, and eventually to introduce sharia law. Provocation was called for and offence justified in order to teach the "immigrant other" a serious lesson, and at the same time wage a battle for what "we all" believe in, before it is too late.

I really have to tip my hat to Hedetoft here.  He summed up everything that’s wrong with this debate in 13 wonderfully pithy words:  "Testing the limits of Muslim tolerance rather than observing the limits of civility."  It’s like a fine Haiku.

Those words also highlight how Europeans are as much on trial here as Muslims.  This sad story is no less of Western arrogance and intolerance than of Muslim extremism and insecurity.

The whole article excellent and worth reading, but the piece de resistance is this insight in the final paragraph:

In the meantime, what should be obvious is that this has nothing to do with a clash of civilizations. What, one might ask, is civilised about the behaviour of the Danish newspaper, its government, or for that matter the violent, powerless, desperate reactions in the Muslim world? Civilisations, if they are to merit that epithet, do not clash. National and religious ideologies and identities, on the other hand, do, particularly when fanned by the explosive combination of economic inequalities, imperial aspirations, symbolic politics, and moralistic self-righteousness.

In a single sentence, Mr. Hedetoft refutes all the sophistic rationalizations for Necon jihad that are incessantly rehashed and re-packaged by a galaxy of "centrist" think tanks and interest groups in Washington.  Like a incantation, these words trip Samuel Huntington and his war-mongering disciples (on both sides of the Muslim/Western divide) down to their intellectual skivies.

Speaking of Hedetoft, there’s another, older (2003) but equally eye-opening article by Hedetoft in openDemocracy.net–which you should all bookmark, if you haven’t already–entitled ‘Cultural transformation’: how Denmark faces immigration’.  He provides some background on Denmark’s political transformation from enlightened welfare state to one of Europe’s most closed and xenophobic societies.

The following passage was particularly striking for me, as its discourse is shockingly reminiscent of the rhetoric of "White Power" nuts in America, who improbably claim that white folk and this nebulous thing called "White culture" are under siege in contemporary American life.

Thus, spokespersons for the preservation of historical Danishness often move on to a second kind of argument to justify their ideological attack on immigration. This sees the issue in existential, even apocalyptic terms. An example comes from the first reading in the Danish Folketing (parliament), in April 2002, of a proposal to permit the naturalisation of specified foreign residents. A major representative of the Danish People’s Party (DPP) and vicar in the Church of Denmark, Søren Krarup, argued that “Danes are increasingly becoming foreigners in their own country(…) Parliament is permitting the slow extermination of the Danish people”. He continued by predicting that “our descendants” will “curse” those politicians who are responsible for increasing the “alienation of Danes in Denmark”.

As a Danish American, it pains me to note how uncannily this rhetoric ressembles that of the Ku Klux Klan.