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Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise. And it is an interesting case study, apart from Salman Rushdie's Fatwa, probably the most interesting case study, on the attack against freedom of speech in the West and York. But first I'd like to thank you for supporting the constructive criticism. If you're not supporting me yet, you can do so on patreon.com slash Aaron Flamm in one word, patreon.com slash Aaron Flamm, or on SWISH.046.7689437.
If you want something more material for your support, please visit my webpage, AaronFlamm.com slash merchandise, where you will find t-shirts and magnets with deconstructed criticisms, creed, your feelings are hurting my thoughts. As well as my book, This is a Swedish Tiger about Sweden's own culture of silence, mainly concerning the Swedish social democrats support to, and for, Hitler's Nazi Germany, and how the social democrats of Sweden thereafter rekindle their friendship with another old ally of Hitler's, namely the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists. The book has led to a court case against me by the state of Sweden, so if you want to know more about why I'm sued, I suggest you buy the book at AaronFlamm.com slash merchandise. Fleming Rose is a journalist and editor who since many years lived with protection of PET, the Danish FBI, for publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
The publication of the cartoons by the Danish paper, Yulans Posten, in September of 2005, led to mass protests in the Muslim world and the West, with burning of Danish embassies calls for boycott of Denmark, and attempted terrorist attacks against Fleming Rose and one of the cartoonists, Kurt Besselgaard. The tyranny of silence is Fleming Rose's attempt at explaining what happened. It is a book about much more than the cartoon controversy itself. It is a text about freedom of speech, the limits of tolerance, the importance of individualism and protection of universal human rights.
With those words, I present Fleming Rose. Enjoy. Welcome to deconstructed criticism, Mr Fleming Rose. Thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure. How are you today? I'm pretty good. I have been looking after my grandchild in these COVID-19 times, so I had a lot of fun listening to him.
OK, how old is he? He is five years old, rising to the brother who was back to school, in fact. All right, so he's the first time. Yeah, well, he's not a super spreader.
I don't think so. In fact, he was tested yesterday, so everything should be fine. Yeah, what about you? I'm fine.
No praise. I haven't been infected in a year's time, so I'm happy about that. Sweden, overall, is not so good, as you might know. Yeah, do you think so?
Well, we've had 12,000 deaths now in a year, which, compared to the other Scandinavian countries, at least, is... Well, we're not leading in low deaths. That's what I'm sure. Yeah, but I think that you're really still out.
But because there are other factors, I think it's too simplistic to look at the coronavirus in an aerosense. You also have to look at it at suicide, non-diagnosed, cancer, things like that, or the longer term, diseases that are not being treated, because all the focus has been on lockdown and treating the coronavirus. But I think we learn new things every day. Absolutely.
Sometimes you discuss the coronavirus. Fortunately, that's not my fifth of expertise. No, I've read your book, The Tyranny of Silence, published up at Cato Institute. It's a riveting read, very troublesome.
But before we do that, I usually start off the show with a very broad question to my guest, in order to let yourself define you. So in your own words, who are you, Fleming Rose? Well, I will say in this context, I am a journalist, former editor, and a former foreign correspondent who spent 12 years first as a student, and then as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow. I lived in the Soviet Union in 1981.
So I had the privilege of living in a totalitarian dictatorship. And I covered the fall of the Soviet Union. I lived in Russia from 1996, and then again from 1999 until 2004. I used to work as a translator.
I translated novels and nonfiction books from Russia into Danish, and I also worked as a translator at the Danish Refugee Council, where I helped people from the then Soviet Union, people of mostly Jewish background, integrated into Danish society. And through that work, I got in touch with dissidents who were based in Western Europe. And I think this is in fact the main frame, if you want to understand my approach to free speech and why I got involved in this so-called cartoon affair so many years ago. But after shock, still being filled, I still lived with bodyguards, even though this happened more than 15 years ago.
But my approach to free speech and my adversity to self-censorship was very much a product of my experience living in the Soviet Union and being in touch with people who had been willing to sacrifice their freedom in order to be able to speak their minds and being able to disagree with the Soviet government. I know Natansz Jarransky, Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, who spent I think nine years in the labor camp in the Urals, and he was exchanged I think in 1986 with a Soviet spy and he went immediately to Israel and became a famous politician in Israel. He established his own party. I think his story, in the book I quote from his book The Case for Democracy, and I interviewed him a couple of times in the Jerusalem.
And he made quite an impression on me and he's one of those dissidents who paid a price for insisting on their right to freedom of expression and religion. And you also pay a price, since you as you say, you live with the bodyguards 24-7 I suppose. Yes, but I think I'm privileged to compare to people like Jarransky and the big fundamental difference that makes it difficult to compare my situation to their situation is that I have the support of the Danish state. The Danish government is supporting me and in fact they are paying for my security, which is a huge and fundamental difference.
And in that sense I feel very privileged. I'm not saying it's easy to live with bodyguards, that's not the case. And I can tell you were long and maybe borrowing any notes about what kind of psychological challenge that is, but I don't feel threatened in my day-to-day life, like when you are living in a totalitarian dictatorship where you always have to watch your back because the state is everywhere. My situation is very different.
Yes, at least you get to play with your grandchild. So I know it's been quite a while since the so-called cartoon crisis or cartoon gate. 16 years now, right? 15 plus I think.
Yeah, but I would, because I read a book and it's partly not entirely, but partly about the cartoon crisis. So could you describe what you've written to me? Yeah, I mean the book was published on the fifth anniversary of the publication of the cartoons. They were published in September 2005 and my book was published in Danish in September 2010.
The version you read was published in 2014 in the United States. And it means that I was offered to write a book in the immediate aftermath. That was in fact my intention and the debate that I was involved in in 2005, 2006 and the following years was quite heated. And my original intention was to write a book documenting why I am right and others are wrong.
But in the process I discovered that you can have different opinions about those cartoons and it's not so that one point of view is the right one. So I figured out that what I have to do is to write my own story and why I think the way I do. And this was a consequence of me traveling around the world for five years. I was in Jerusalem, I was in Doha, I was in Russia, in Ukraine, in Sweden, Norway, United States, in Canada.
I traveled around the world and debated the cartoons and the principles of free speech on very different platforms. And doing that I discovered that it's more or less the same debate everywhere. But the way you slice the cake between free speech and limitations of free speech is different from society to society. And it's also different in every society.
People do have different perceptions and different understandings, what should be allowed to be set in public and what should not be allowed. And you as a stand-up comedian, I think that's in fact part of your profession, to challenge and find out where those borders are, because that's quite often where things get funny. But it's also sometimes where what is intended to be funny is not perceived as funny. You can never be sure whether at joke will work or not.
But the point is to be on the edge. So before we get our head ourselves and tell more into free speech, and especially for my younger listeners, or my older listeners who might be demented and have forgotten, what was the cartoon crisis and what was your logic behind publishing these cartoons? I think at the end of August 2005, Danish children's writer, his name is called Blütken, sounds Norwegian. In fact, when the public, he gave an interview to the Danish wire service, why the new service was so pure, saying that he had written a book for children about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, but that he had difficulties finding an illustrator for the book.
That illustrators were committing self-censorship. They didn't want to do this, or some of them, because they were afraid of the consequences. And this was a nationwide big star in Denmark. It was on the front page of every newspaper.
Why did you want to do a children's book about a life of Muhammad? Was he a racist? I don't think so. He was the most accused of being a racist.
And in fact, the illustrations in the book, they are very neutral. It's not cartoons, it's illustrations. It's realistic. You would say images done in the realistic tradition, like a vipotage from a court case, no distorted features.
But this writer insisted on face illustrations of the main character, because that is the way you do children's book in Denmark. I mean, in spite of the fact that some Muslims accept a prohibition on images of the face of Muhammad, in fact, it's nowhere written in the Quran. I found out doing research for that book. It's not anywhere in the Quran that you have this taboo.
It was a consequence of living Islam through the ages that it was convenient for some Muslims to impose a prohibition on images of the Prophet. But that's another story. But this children's writer, this story was on the front page of every newspaper. We published illustrations from the book, G Genons Posten, newspaper where I used to work, but other papers did as well.
And then we had a following up debate at the paper. Are there more angles to cover? The first round of the coverage we called illustrators, translators, museum directors, movie makers to find out is a self-censorship or not among people in cultural life in Denmark? And some said, no, there is no self-censorship.
This is an invented crisis to sell more books. Others were saying, yes, there is a self-censorship and it is a problem. So you had these two positions. And in order to continue the debate and frame it according to a fundamental journalistic principle saying, don't tell, show.
A reporter at the paper came up with this idea. Let's find out whether that is a self-censorship or not by inviting a cartoonist or illustrator to draw the Prophet. And it's very simple, but I think it's a genuine idea because it's so simple. And that idea landed on my table and I had been in touch with the chairman of the Danish Cartoonist Society a few weeks before.
So I got in touch with him. He spoke to his members and then I wrote a letter to them inviting them to draw the Prophet as they see him. So not the caricature or just, you know, there, I mean, you can Google Danish cartoons or modern cartoons and you can see the full page. I received 12 images.
And the images are very different. They are, there's a diversity both in whom is targeted for satire and the way the Prophet is depicted. But you can say, unfortunately, because of the conflict, everybody focused on one single cartoon. The one of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, done by Kullvestagard, who was a cartoonist at Uland Posten.
And even though I understand that there are Muslims who were upset by that cartoon, I think it can be, it can like every image, it can be interpreted in many different ways. I myself understood that cartoon as saying, there are Muslims, there are some Muslims who in the name of their religion commit violence, in the name of the Prophet commit violence. And therefore you had, you know, the bomb in the term of the Prophet. He might not be aware of it.
And I think that was in fact a pretty accurate interpretation of what was happening in reality. We had terrorist attacks committed by people who called themselves Muslims and they were committing these terrorist attacks in the name of their Prophet or in the name of their religion. That's a fact. Yes, so they were true.
But then what happened after the publication of these cartoons? Because you did, you published them to sort of find out how many would self censor at this request. And you got a fair share of people who wouldn't draw Muhammad, right? I received 12 cartoons from 25 active members of the Danish cartoonist association.
One cartoonist specifically called me and said he would not participate because he was afraid. And it turns out that the illustrator, and that was also the starting point of our initiative. The illustrator who did the illustrations for the children's book insisted on anonymity. And that was something I had known from the Soviet Union where you had people signing, you know, letters anonymously, books being published in the West on the plsotonyms and things like that.
Self censorship to me means that you would like to say something, you would like to publish something, but you are afraid of doing it because of what might happen to you. That means self censorship is not the same as good manners. You know, when I go to a restaurant, I eat with a knife and a fork. I follow certain customs, but I do it voluntarily.
If I don't want to eat that way, I will not go to a restaurant. I will find another way to get food. So, so there is this, this, this element of a sense of intimidation and fear when you come to self censorship, because some people say, well, we all have to self censorship. I know if we don't self censor, we will not be able to, you know, live together.
And that's true, but that is not self censorship to me. It is to follow certain norms and customs. And in this case, when we are used to satire, when you come to Jesus Christ and, and, and, and the secular, sacred figures and so on and so forth, why shouldn't we be allowed to do satire when it comes to Islam? And that was, to me, that was a fundamental idea, you know, pursuing this project, you know, by publishing those cartoons, I, and my newspaper, said to Muslims in Denmark, we do not expect more of you.
We do not expect less of you. We expect of you exactly the same as we do of every other group and individual in our society. And in that fact, lies a fact of recognition. We recognize you as full and mature members of our society, not as foreigners, not as outsiders that we have to treat as guests, you know, when you are over light, when they visit your home, they are here to stay.
So I think in fact, you can say it was an integration project. Because there is a difference between farting in a crowded room, out of, of staining from farting in a crowded room, from lightness, and abstaining from farting because you will get killed if you fart in a crowded room. Exactly. All right.
So you published this and then what happened? The first day I got a call from a newspaper window in the western part of Copenhagen who complained and said he was a Muslim, that he would not sell our newspaper anymore. And I didn't pay much attention because as an editor, I received this call on a daily weekly basis. So people react to what's printed in the newspaper, people unsubscribe the paper if they are dissatisfied with an article or editorial or something else.
So I didn't pay much attention and not much happened. But within two or three weeks, there was a demonstration in Copenhagen protesting the cartoons. And then a heated debate started in Denmark and death threats began being issued against the newspaper and the consciousness. And there was some bad accidents.
In fact, a young man was being arrested with an iPhone in his way to the homes of two of the consciousness with private addresses and things like that. Quite unpleasant. But basically it was a peaceful and heated debate in Denmark. It went in waves.
And there were from time to time, I did some interviews with international publications. But it wasn't an international story until a group of Danish imams traveled to the Middle East in December 2005 and again in January 2006. They visited the summit of the organization of the Islamic Conference in Mecca, bringing the cartoons and in fact also some cartoons that had never been published in the paper and were far more offensive than the ones that had been published. And they were able to persuade these Islamic countries to pass a resolution condemning the cartoons and calling for raising this in the UN.
Bill Clinton was there and he also condemned the cartoons although he didn't know the context. And then they also traveled to Egypt. Egypt was a driver of this crisis in the beginning because in November 2005 you had elections in Egypt. And this time for many years the Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to run in that election on the pressure from the Bush government.
And Mubarak, the Mubarak regime who basically was secular and wanted to demonstrate that he was a true defender of Muslims. This was a gift from heaven for him. So he exploited this issue to mobilize people in Egypt against Denmark, boycotting Danish products and things like that. Although in November I think 2005 eight of the cartoons were published on the front page of an Egyptian newspaper.
But I would say that the international, what I learned about the mechanisms here is that you had a local issue and it was nowhere written in Iran that this would be a global crisis. People were saying afterwards you should have no man blah blah blah. No, this was a matter of coincidences. And I found out that at other times you had publications of the prophet that did not trigger these kind of international crisis.
But it turned out that in Egypt you had a domestic political situation that could exploit these cartoons. You had the same in the Palestinian territories where you had an election in January 2006 and the Sickle of Fata used the cartoons against the Islamist Hamas movement. You had similar cases in Pakistan and you had al-Kawadawi, the Islamist preacher I think is based in Doha, where the show on Al Jazeera calling for a day of rage against the Muslim brotherhood. Yes, exactly.
So, but you know all this was driven by domestic situations and not by the content of the cartoons in and by itself. The cartoons were used for other ends and that's the way it turned into a global crisis at the end of January, beginning of February 2006. Yeah, in the book you're right in the beginning of the book actually. So, you visited the Islam scholar Bernard Lewis in 2006 and asked him and he had an interesting theory why suddenly non-Muslims in Europe were subjects of Islamic law because in a sense this is whatever it says in the Quran, this is now Islamic law, you're not supposed to make images of Muhammad and what was his thoughts on this?
Well, Bernard Lewis, whom I interviewed at Princeton in the United States and at that time I think he was already 93 years old but he had a very clear mind. I think he lived until 103 or something. But his point was that this was something new that was a consequence of migration of Muslims to non-Islamic countries. Traditionally, Islamic law doesn't apply in non-Islamic countries and that has to be the case throughout history, meaning that when Muslims were travelling to other parts of the world, they did not insist on applying Islamic law in non-Islamic countries.
So, to him this was in fact one of the first instances where Muslims living in non-Islamic majority countries were insisting on imposing Islamic law on non-Muslims. Because Bernard is not part of the Uma. No, and we are not even part of the conference of Islamic countries. But it is kind of strange because in Islam you have the Uma which is the Islamic world and then you have the non-Muslim countries and then you have these in between countries, Dimi countries you can tell.
So, in his view, this was like a starting point for Europe being seen in the Islamic world as Dimi countries. Yes, as a potential calming Islamic part of the world. Yes. And how did you react to this when you heard him say that?
Out of your curiosity from my part. I found it very interesting. I am not an expert on Islam even though I had a crash course back in 2005 and 2006. I found it very interesting and it kind of put things into historical perspective.
But I also heard from a Danish expert on the Islamic world and another point that I found interesting because as you might know this taboo on depictions of the Prophet is a Sunni Islamic phenomenon. In fact, until this crisis if you went to Tehran to the Shia world you could buy posters with depictions of the Prophet. So there is no prohibition on images of the Prophet within Shia Islam. And this expert on Islam in Denmark who had been living in Beirut at some point said that the problem here is that very few Sunni Muslims have been living as minorities in the Islamic world.
They are mostly the majority in the countries where they live and therefore they were in fact behaving like a majority in Denmark trying to oppose their norms and standards rules of their religion on society at launch. And to me in fact that was the essence of this conflict. That you had some Muslims who were insisting on applying their taboos and rules on everybody which basically meant that I as an un-Muslim had to submit myself to Muslim taboos in the public domain. And to me that is incompatible with the secular liberal democracy.
I understand when I go to a mosque of course I behave in accordance with Islamic law. I take off my shoes. I will not bring consumers of the Prophet Muhammad. If I bring my daughter she will be addressed accordingly.
But when Muslims outside their holy houses or sacred places demand that I submit myself to their roots I do not think they are asking for my respect. I think they are asking for my submission. And that is incompatible with the liberal-security democracy. Absolutely.
But I have already this argument about minorities having a hard time adapting to being minorities before. But I only hear it about Sunni Muslims. I do not hear it about the Han Chinese because if you apply the same logic to the Han Chinese then China towns all over the world would be filled with demonstrations all the time. So I am not sure it is just an issue of minorities in general at least having a problem adapting.
It is a specific minority in this case. Yeah. But it is also because it is like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is universal. It has universal principles.
And I am not an expert on Islam. So I do not pretend. But I really think that Islam is living through a crisis. And what we are experiencing in Europe when it comes to problems with integration and coexistence.
I think it is part of that process. And I think it is. Quick question. When was the last time a display ad changed your mind?
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Advertise. I think within Islam from my point of view as a non-Muslim and as a strong believer in freedom of expression and freedom of religion I think that Muslims in Europe and in other parts of the world, but I live in Europe so I care about that, I think they have to work out a doctrine of their faith that is compatible with being able to live with blasphemy. That is too many Muslims living in Europe believe that it's okay to kill people if they commit blasphemy. Because they believe it is justified by their faith and they also believe it's okay to kill people who commit a plasticity like Samarushti, that if you are born a Muslim and you cannot leave your religion voluntarily, if you do that you have committed a capital crime.
If you take Pakistan, I mean you have the difference in Pakistan for blasphemy, meaning that if you kill a thousand people in a terrorist attack, this is comparable from the point of view of law enforcement and the criminal code to tell me a joke about the profit mark. I think that is a huge problem. How would you describe the difference between actions and words? Because there seems to be in the West as well nowadays the line has become blurred between action and words.
Yeah, that's true. And I graduated in linguistics, I started linguistics, I understand that you can have speech acts and you can have these philosophical definitions and you can have a discussion about that. But in this context, I think it's very important to distinguish between words and deeds, between words and actions. And this distinction is very important because the fight in Europe for freedom of expression and against censorship started with imposing this distinction between words and action.
After the walls of religion in Europe in the 1516 and 17th century, where in fact words were being equated to actions in the sense that if you said something critical about the church, Catholic country, you would be killed. You would have your tongue cut off or burned on the state because those words were being perceived as a physical attack on the social, political and religious order of a community. Which meant that Catholics could kill Protestants and Protestants could kill Catholics and Christians could kill Jews and Christian minorities and so on and so forth. So until the moment when the majority understood, we cannot go on like this, we have to accept and work out a doctrine of religious tolerance, meaning that we make a distinction between saying something offensive and committing a criminal offense.
So that even though I hate the Protestant version of Christianity, I will not kill a Protestant for practice and his faith, even though he is a minority in this Catholic country. And this way in Europe we worked out a doctrine of religious tolerance, then later became a doctrine of political tolerance and religious pluralism and political pluralism that is based on the distinction between words and action, basically implying that on the one end of the spectrum you have thoughts and on the other end you have actions and somewhere in between you have words. I as a liberal tend to think that words are more like thoughts, while people who are, you know, who are going for more limitations on speech tend to equate words and actions. And you know, a fundamental difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is in fact when it comes to this distinction between words and action.
In a democracy and in a dictatorship, you will all, everybody will be prosecuted for tax violations, murder, stealing, drunk driving, fast driving. These offenses, actions are both criminal offense and in a dictatorship and in a democracy. But the difference is that in a dictatorship you treat descending thoughts and ideas as if they were criminal actions. That's why Natansh Arundsky, who spoke about in the beginning, or Andrei Sakharov or Alexander Sajanitson, the heroes of my life, they spent time behind bars or in labor camps or in exile.
Even though they did not do anything to harm other people, they were just speaking and thinking freely. And my concern now is that this distinction between words and action is being eroded in liberal democracies in the West, and that is a huge danger against free speech. Yes, because you say you view speech differently in a dictatorship in a democracy, but depending on how you view speech as actions or thoughts or more to one side or the other, you also get different concepts of tolerance. Absolutely.
And yes, that's a very good point. And thank you for pointing it out. Because you were a tolerance very cavalierly. Exactly.
And in fact, you started. Tolerance these days means that you might have a right to say what you're saying, but I don't like it. So therefore, please shut up. Or I don't like what you're saying.
And therefore, I don't think you have a right to say it. So if you say something, I don't like you are intolerant. Well, in fact, it's exactly the other way around because to me, the definition of tolerance is the ability to live with things that you hate, that you actively dislike without resorting to prohibition, censorship, intimidation, violence, or threats. That is the definition of tolerance.
So it's not you who tell a joke that is intolerant. It is the guy who is listening to your joke and wants to shut you down. While in our society today, if you tell an SD joke or a joke that makes fun of a group of people, people will say you are intolerant. But that is turning the historical understanding of tolerance on his head.
The way it wasn't understood in the aftermath of the wars of religion was, in fact, the ability of Protestants being able to live with Catholics without killing them or banning them. That is the foundation of tolerance. And in order to establish free speech or rehabilitate free speech in our part of the world, I think we have to return to the original concept of tolerance as having to do without ability to live with things that we don't like, without banning them, without cancelling them, without centering them, without threatening them or even killing them. So if you would exemplify this idea, would you say, for instance, sorry, I would have to apologize to the studio owner after I'm done with this.
So for example, if I just said something intolerant, I just continually, wherever I end up, I always for some reason do slapstick. So would you say, for instance, if someone threw their daughter off a balcony for wearing a tube top and I would make a joke about this, who's the intolerant and he gets offended by my joke, who's the intolerant personally? Well, this is the one who is doing that to his daughter. Well, you might argue that, but you like freedom.
So, you know, different. Yeah, we need to get out. My horse is straight, but it's very easy to get confused and target the messenger. And it's also, of course, when you are telling a joke like that, you make that person uncomfortable.
And one of the challenges of learning to be tolerant because we're not born tolerant, I think we are in fact born intolerant. We had to learn it and it's very painful and difficult to live side by side with people whose faith and way of life and taste of what you don't like. But being tolerant doesn't necessarily mean just to shut up. And you know, like the Ottoman Empire, you live in a cigarette that you're in one quarter of the city, the Christians in another and the Muslims in other places.
No. In fact, part of being tolerant is also daring to speak out against the things you don't like, but you don't you don't ban thing and you don't threaten intimidated and use violence. Because that's where you draw mine between speech and action. Yes.
And it does not mean to shut up. Shut up is not being tolerant. Because you got a few allegations against your publication of these cartoons. One that seemed to have been recurring was that the cartoons have been likened to the Nazi cartoons about the Jews in Nazi Germany.
How would you respond to that? I think it's very unpleasant to be to being labeled as you know, semi-nouncing or as a racist or anti-semite or similar. Those cartoons are like the Jewish in Nazi Germany. I don't think so.
And the fundamental difference here is while anti-semitic cartoons is stereotyping the Jew, the new and all these features, there is no average Muslim or no stereotype of the Muslim in our cartoons. So they are in fact not targeting a group. I mean, you have Muslims who are black, you have Muslims who are white, you have Muslims who are red, I don't know, tall and small in China, in the Middle East, in the United States, in Europe, in Africa. There is a fundamental difference between targeting a group of people based on the ethnicity and making fun of their religion.
There's situations about ideas. This is about ideas. And I know a lot of people find it difficult, but I think in fact this is a fundamental idea of the Enlightenment tradition which I kind of identify that you can create a fence around people, but you cannot create a fence or build a fence or wall around ideas. And if you do that, you end up in a tyranny of silence or dictatorship.
Yes, because there's also a difference between, because when I did research for this, I read your book and I did some research. And one of the things was that a lot of people nowadays, they think that Muslims in Europe today are like the Jews in Nazi Germany in the 30s. That is outrageous. I mean, I'm sorry.
Because the Jews of Nazi Germany, they were stripped of all their rights as citizens. While Muslims in Europe, they have the same equality and freedom as I do. They are not being singled out with their shops. They have access to old professions.
And the Jews were not enduring those right in Nazi Germany. I mean, they were stripped of their rights to be teachers, doctors, lawyers. They were not allowed to drive on the bus to sit on benches in the park. And finally, they were being stripped of their citizenship.
And they were not being attacked in Germany. Nothing like this is happening to Muslims in Europe. So I'm going to have to circle back some here. Because when you published these cartoons, they weren't against Muslims in the group.
Were they? They were against the holy group of people. They were about self-censorship when it comes to, I would say they were not, they were targeting creative people in Denmark and Western Europe. And challenging him.
How so well that a stand-up comedian Denmark was saying, I'm not afraid of pacing on the Bible in front of a camera, but I did not do the same thing with the Quran. And it's annoyed me. A museum in London that removes an installation depicting a copy of the Quran, the Bible, and the Talmud, the Talmud, the Talmud, the Talmud called God as a great aftermath of the 7-7 bombings in London in 2005. And had nothing to do with Jews and Christians in London, but only with Muslims.
Because that's John Latham, right? He made a piece reflecting what he thought about the Iraq War, where he had cut up an Old Testament, a New Testament, and a Quran and put them inside a glass. And I think it was the Tate Britain who removed it from the exhibition. Yes, without asking John Latham and without asking the charade of the exhibition.
It was a clear example of censorship. In fact, in Sweden, in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the world, in Sweden, there was a similar case with a painting done by an Algerian-French female artist, depicting a man who had been having sex with the first words from the Quran on the image. And a lot of Muslims in Sweden complained, and the director of the museum, who happened to be Danish, in fact, removed the painting. But when an Iranian-born female artist who had fled to Sweden from a theocracy in Iran, organized one woman demonstration in front of the museum and demanded that this painting being reinstated, nothing happened.
Because she did not threaten anybody or create fear. So I think the issue, I didn't know almost anything about Islam when I commissioned those cartoons. But the point was that you had filmmakers, museum curators, theaters, newspapers, book publishers, who seemed to commit self-censorship and making a difference between the way they treated Islam and the way they treated other ideas. Because if that is the case, then Muslims don't have the same rights as other European citizens.
They have the same rights plus the right law to be offended. Exactly. And in that way, we are not treating them as grown-ups. I think, in fact, if I was a Muslim, I would be humiliated, a few humiliated and being treated like a child.
I am able, on my own, I have a rational mind. I can make up my own mind about what I read and hear and make a decision about how I want to react to this. I'm not an animal. Humans are not animals that you push a button and then you get a certain kind of reaction.
No. We are different because we can think and we can decide how we're going to react to what other people say and do. Yes. And you said Bill Clinton condemned your publication of the cartoons.
How did the EU react to the OIC demands? This is the organization of Islamic Conference that you referenced earlier. Yeah. Javier Solana, who was then the EU's Foreign Minister, traveled to, I think, Saudi Arabia and set to the Muslim world that I will guarantee that this is not going to happen again.
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I don't know. You have to ask him, but I really think it sounded quite strange. And nobody gave him that mandate. He is not writing the laws in Denmark or in Sweden for that matter.
But he was a way of trying to calm down a situation in a very, I would say, short-sighted way because we know from history that if you give in to threats and intimidation, you will not get less of it. You will get more of it because you show that it works. So why stop? If you get you away once, why not try another time and the third time and the fourth time?
It is very the first decade of the 2000s. So where are we now? Now we're living in a very different time, I think. And I can only imagine what I can do in crisis today would look like.
Remember in 2005 Facebook was just created. We didn't have Twitter. We didn't have social media. We had emails.
I received a lot of emails from around the world. We had a website. So the technological communication infrastructure has changed. We also didn't have YouTube on that scale back in 2005, 2006.
But I will also say that the consumer crisis is very interesting as a kind of masterclass in the kind of issues we are debating today. That has to do with the communication technology and migration. I know we are living in a time of corona, so we are not traveling that much. But what characterizes our world today is how cheap and easy it is to travel and move.
And people are moving around at a scale and in numbers never seen before. And the cartoon crisis was a very interesting case in the kind of clashes we are experiencing in this new world of communication technology and migration. Where we are all either virtual or physical neighbors. And we have to manage this growing diversity.
And I think basically there are two ways to do that. You can either say, if you accept my taboo, I will accept your taboo. You call this a grievance culture in your book. Yes, and it opens the floodgates for censorship because every time you say something I don't like, I can just say this offends me.
So please shut up. So this is one way to go. If you accept my taboo, I accept yours. It sounds nice, but it will end in a tyranny of silence because there is always somebody out there who will be offended by what somebody says.
The other way to go is to ask ourselves what are the minimal limitations that we need to live in peace in this world of diversity. And I think that is incitement to violence. That is the fundamental limitation on freedom of expression that we need. But of course, the other part of the equation is that we have to learn how to live with things that we don't like.
How to live with people practicing faith or saying things about what I think and believe in that I don't like. And that is not easy. It's easier if you have comedy. Exactly.
That's a very important part of it. We should be able to laugh ourselves. That's very important. That's also part of the European tradition of set time.
But I think we have to learn, you know, I give this example of every time a public official in Europe or in the West, you know, has said something bad. They are being sent in sensitivity training. So you have to learn, you know, how to be sensitive. And I think we have to be sent to insensitive training.
So we grow figure skins and not. I know of course there's enough. Exactly. And in fact, in a practical way, tell dirty jokes or bad jokes and see how people react and learn to live with that.
And I also know, in fact, I think you know this from your own practice. But I know from staying down comedians in the UK that they have sent a fundamental shift in what they can make fun, what kind of jokes they can tell. And the scope is really growing and narrow. And that is just one indicator of the fact that freedom of expression is in bad standing.
And I think for a lot of people in Europe today and in the United States and other parts of the world, free speech is no longer a fundamental value. Other values like the right to not be offended, the right to a safe space to dignity and so on and so forth, Trump's freedom of expression. And to me, this is also proof of the fact that free speech is not only about the law. You know, you can have a very good law like United States, you have the first amendment, you have a better protection of free speech compared to anywhere in the world.
But free speech is also about social and cultural norms. If you don't have a culture of freedom of expression, you can have the best law in the world, but you will not have freedom of expression because people are being socially and professionally ostracized if they say something wrong, even though it is perfectly legal. You know, they will lose their job, they will lose their friends, they will be canceled and so on and so forth. You make this very interesting distinction between a free society and what you call a fear society.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, this is also from my experience in the South Union, where I sense, you know, coming from Denmark in 1980 as a young student, you just had this sense of fear, you know, it was like hanging in the air. People were being afraid of speaking to a foreigner like me, dealing with foreigners and, you know, whispering in the streets or sitting in the kitchen and having all the conversations that you could not have on your workplace or in public transportation and so on. So I think this is in fact a decision we have to make.
I think fear in fact is the most important trigger for censorship. If you can see it with the corona restrictions in the free world, if you are able to frame an issue as a choice between life and death, that if you don't do this, there is the fear that you will die or that very bad things will happen, then you are willing to accept almost any restriction on your freedom. And therefore I think we have to be very alert when people are playing the fear card. And it also comes, it also has to do with counterterrorism restrictions on civil liberties, even though I, you know, I live with the consequences of a terrorist threat.
But I think sometimes that that counterterrorism law has gone too far. And because this is an issue for the security services, it's very easy. It's very difficult to find out how these laws work. You know, have they in fact been able to prevent terrorist attacks?
It's quite difficult to find out. But you know you have this old saying by Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of the United States who said that if you are willing to sacrifice your liberty for security, then you don't deserve neither security nor freedom. That may be a tough statement. And I don't know if it's always true, but we know for sure that if you caught away people's freedom, then you will get less freedom.
But you can never be sure if you get more security. Well, I'm pretty sure I live in Sweden. So they say we live in the safest country in the world. And for some reason, everyone around me seems afraid of everything all the time.
And I think it has to do with their obsession about security because it makes you afraid of everything. Yeah. Just. And I think in fact that is it made have a special, we played self out in a special way in Sweden.
This is a problem of the so-called free world that we prioritize security and safety to a degree that is just incompatible with freedom. And you know in the end, life is dangerous. We are all going to die. Yes.
I mean, we can compare your situation in Denmark to our own last weeks who also made a, well, he made, he actually sketched it himself in not only order that he sketched a Mohammed cartoon. And for that he is now living like a prisoner in Sweden. What's your opinion on last weeks? Because I know you've been in touch with him.
Yes. And I think that's the point of living with security in a democracy is that you can live with your life as you want to. That is in fact the challenge for me psychologically that I do all the things I want to do. And it's up to the security service to make sure that I'm safe.
It's not up to the security service to make sure that I'm safe. It's not up to the security service to make sure that I'm safe. It's not up to me. The point of having security is that you can do all the things you want to.
And you don't have to fear for your life. And in that sense, I feel pretty free in Denmark, even though I have to live with security and it's not always easy. I understand but last weeks, I mean, the Swiss of ours is I'm posing, you know, very heavy limitations on what he can do and what he can't do. And he has advanced notes to his security team, which has to be several days.
So there's no spontaneity in his life. He cannot live with his girlfriend because of so-called security reasons. And I can tell you I asked my security team about that and say it's they don't think it's it should be imparted to organize security. And at the same time, he would be able to live with his girlfriend.
It shouldn't be a problem. There's one more question I would like to actually there's two more questions I'd like to ask you. One is about two international, you could call them articles or laws. One is the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, Article 20 paragraph two, and the other is on the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination Article 4.
And I would like to ask you, what are these laws and why are they problematic to use the intersectional ist word? Yeah. Well, first, I think these two articles are problematic because they serve as the foundation of hate speech laws all around the world. The folk hits, I think in Sweden, the folk school in Denmark is called the law against racism.
And the intention, you can say that you wanted to criminalize hateful speech targeting a specific group is well intentioned in the aftermath of the Holocaust and because of what happened to Jews in Nazi, Germany and other parts of Europe during World War II. But the problem is, in fact, first you had hate speech laws in my Germany and they didn't protect the Jews that well. And the other thing is that the phrasing of Article 20.2 of the Covenant on Political and Civil Rights was in fact initiated by the Soviet Union and started in the UN Committee on Human Rights. That was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt in the 40s and Eleanor Roosevelt said at the time, if we adopt this article in this wording, it will be the perfect tool for dictator to silence dissenting voices.
Because it was too broad, it was not just incitement to violence, it was incitement to hatred. And when I wrote the book, I looked into definitions and turns out there is no clear definition of hate apart from dislike, meaning that one man's hate speech is another man's comedy or poetry. And it makes it possible to apply these laws against dissenting voices. And that is my main problem with these articles and this is exactly the way they had been used in the Soviet Union after World War II and in other parts of the world.
So I think I would like to get rid of hate speech laws and just have laws criminalizing incitement to violence. It means getting rid of hate speech laws and blasphemy laws. We don't have a blasphemy law anymore than that. It was in fact repelled in the aftermath of the cartoon crisis, back and forth.
I think we've repelled it in 2017 or something like that. But in a world of social media, I think the trend is moving in the other direction. Obviously. Yes, there is pressure for a broader definition of hate speech laws.
And I think I understand the emotion and the instinctive reaction because you see harassment online. And people committing harm, you know, revenge porn, all kinds of evil attacks online. And we have to fight that. But the problem is that these real cases of harm and harassment is being confused with just making people uncomfortable by saying things that may be violating certain norms, but it's not in any way causing harm.
So I think we have to work a lot more on making people resilient instead of fighting the content. How do you cope with severe criticism and unpleasant things being said about you? How do you cope with that? Because social media, I guess, is here to stay and this will only scale up.
We will not get less social media. And it means that you will have to remove billions of Facebook postings to fight this in a consistent way and I just think it's impossible. It's impossible to do this in a consistent way on scale. Yeah, you write in your book that one thing one can take away from the dissident movement in the Soviet Union was their insistence on universal human rights that everyone should have the same rights and responsibilities.
And it should be individuals who have these rights and not groups. So I think that was nice. Can I ask you just one last question, sir? Because I've been curious because I get a feeling when I did research for this in the Swedish article databases that not one single representative of our state radio or state television made an interview with you personally during the cartoon crisis.
Did anyone contribute wrong from our state media? I think maybe I did one interview with Swedish media back then. I don't long anymore recall all the details, but I will say this that I experienced the profound difference between the interest of other European media and Swedish media. I think also I don't think the consumers were in fact republished in any established Swedish media while that happened in other European countries, apart from the UK.
I think the UK and Sweden were similar in that sense. And I also didn't receive that many invitations to go to Sweden and do public debates. There was one guy who I think he was a member of the European Parliament for the Christian Democrats in Sweden, a former foreign correspondent in Italy. Exactly.
He in fact invited me on his talk show twice. But I think he is also an outlier. I don't think he is. That's why he's in the European Parliament.
We don't want to in Sweden anymore. Yeah. But apart from that, I sense the difference. And I don't think if you look at Norway, I would say that the cartoon debate was transformative for the Norwegian debate about all these issues, integration, Islam, peaceful coexistence, freedom expression, tolerance.
While I don't think that the cartoons in fact affected Sweden that much. It was like a parallel universe. While it was a defining debate, I think even in Germany, I think, but also in the Netherlands and especially in France because of John Yupdul. Yes.
Well, I want to thank you so much both for taking the time and for writing this book. It was a pleasure. I'm more of a pages in books I like and I've marked almost every page in your book. I'm so sorry you sent it to me on sign and I hope that I'll get to meet you at some point in the future to get it signed.
Absolutely. And I very much look forward to reading your book. I hope that I can do an interview with you later this spring or maybe closer to summer and talk about your situation and what happens to you with your book and how all these issues look from your vantage point in Sweden. They look exciting from my vantage point.
I won in the first instance but the state prosecutor has appealed now. So I'm due in court again by end of May and we'll see how it goes. But I work with it in the city court. Yes.
And now they want five million and probably some sort of sentence. But why do they continue? Well, I'd have to reply the same way you replied about Solanas. You just asked them.
So it sounds a little bit weird. It's a bit caffcased. It doesn't sound like a principle. I mean, there are some principles at stake.
Yes. Freedom of speech in Sweden and the right to parody or satire anything you want. So I hope I don't lose for all our sakes. So do I.
Thank you. And it's been a pleasure and we'll speak again soon. We'll stay in touch around and I will try to keep. When will the court case take place?
And of May, like 27th, 28th of May, something like that. Good. All right. Okay.
Be well. See you. Good luck. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to deconstructed criticism. This episode's guest was Flaming Rose who's book The Tyranny of Silence is well worth the read. You can find links to the book at my webpage, erinflan.com in the description of this episode. And you will find a link to that in the description of this episode regardless of what platform you're listening or viewing this on.
Thank you for supporting deconstructed criticism. If you're not supporting me yet, you can do so on patreon.com slash erinflan in one word. patreon.com slash erinflan. Or at switch number double four six seven six eight nine four three seven three seven.
If you want something more material for your support, please visit my webpage erinflan.com slash merchandise where you will find t-shirts and mugs with deconstructed criticisms, creed, your feelings are hurting my thoughts. As well as my book, This Is a Swedish Tiger About Sweden's Own Culture of Science, mainly concerning the Swedish social democrats support to and for, in case there's an obviously Germany during the war and how the social democrats of Sweden thereafter rekindle their friendship with another old ally of hitters, namely the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists. The book is led to a court case against me by the state of Sweden, so if you want to know more about why I'm sued, I suggest you buy the book at erinflan.com slash merchandise. My name is erinflan.
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