By Jacob Laksin
For someone who inadvertently triggered a clash of civilizations, Flemming Rose doesn’t look much like a provocateur. With his salt-and-pepper hair, college sweatshirt, and jeans over sneakers, the cultural editor of the largest Danish daily, Jyllands-Posten, seems disarmingly casual, a far cry from the frothing “Islamophobe” and “far-right” reactionary—never mind the “Straussian neocon Mossad agent”—that some of his more intemperate detractors imagine him to be. But such is the reputation that has shadowed the mild-mannered Rose since September 30, 2005, when he published the 12 now-famous (or infamous) cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that took the world by storm.
By now, the basic outlines of what the Danes call the Karikaturkrisen are well known. Troubled by what he saw as a growing tendency toward self-censorship in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe, especially on the sensitive subject of Islam, Rose commissioned 40 Danish artists to submit drawings of the prophet. Contrary to later accusations, the idea was not to insult Muslim believers but to test whether freethinking artists were prepared to privilege a religious taboo over freedom of speech. Rose made his point. Revealingly, only 12 artists participated, submitting drawings that ranged from lampoons of the center-right paper to a drawing of the prophet with a bomb-shaped turban.
Then all hell broke loose. Although the initial response was muted, by February 2006, the cartoons, distorted to destructive effect by a group of Danish imams, had stoked a backlash in the Muslim world. Rage-fueled riots killed 139 and injured 823; Danish embassies were torched in Lebanon and Syria; and Denmark was hit with boycotts and diplomatic sanctions from Muslim countries. Whatever one’s views of the offending cartoons, they were, by any objective measure, the deadliest drawings ever published. Read more ...
For someone who inadvertently triggered a clash of civilizations, Flemming Rose doesn’t look much like a provocateur. With his salt-and-pepper hair, college sweatshirt, and jeans over sneakers, the cultural editor of the largest Danish daily, Jyllands-Posten, seems disarmingly casual, a far cry from the frothing “Islamophobe” and “far-right” reactionary—never mind the “Straussian neocon Mossad agent”—that some of his more intemperate detractors imagine him to be. But such is the reputation that has shadowed the mild-mannered Rose since September 30, 2005, when he published the 12 now-famous (or infamous) cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that took the world by storm.
By now, the basic outlines of what the Danes call the Karikaturkrisen are well known. Troubled by what he saw as a growing tendency toward self-censorship in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe, especially on the sensitive subject of Islam, Rose commissioned 40 Danish artists to submit drawings of the prophet. Contrary to later accusations, the idea was not to insult Muslim believers but to test whether freethinking artists were prepared to privilege a religious taboo over freedom of speech. Rose made his point. Revealingly, only 12 artists participated, submitting drawings that ranged from lampoons of the center-right paper to a drawing of the prophet with a bomb-shaped turban.
Then all hell broke loose. Although the initial response was muted, by February 2006, the cartoons, distorted to destructive effect by a group of Danish imams, had stoked a backlash in the Muslim world. Rage-fueled riots killed 139 and injured 823; Danish embassies were torched in Lebanon and Syria; and Denmark was hit with boycotts and diplomatic sanctions from Muslim countries. Whatever one’s views of the offending cartoons, they were, by any objective measure, the deadliest drawings ever published. Read more ...
Source: Doublethink
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