In September, 2005, a Danish newspaper called the Jyllands-Posten conducted an experiment in free speech. Its editor, Flemming Rose, wrote to every editorial cartoonist in the country, inviting them to draw a caricature of Mohammed, Islam's Prophet. For Rose, it was a test: Was Denmark still a pluralist society with free speech and a separation of mosque and state, or had Danes begun to censor themselves in fear of Muslim violence?
Twelve cartoonists sent in their work. Some mocked the newspaper for being a provocateur; some were critical of jihad and Islam's treatment of women; still others were a neutral depiction of what Mohammed might have looked like. The news story was a one-day wonder.
The Cartoons that Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen, Yale University Press, 240 pages, $42.50
But two weeks later, 11 Muslim ambassadors – including those from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Libya – sent a letter to Denmark's prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. They complained about an “on-going smearing campaign” targeting Islam, and in addition to the Jyllands-Posten montage, they cited public statements by Danish politicians and journalists. The diplomats weren't very diplomatic: if Fogh Rasmussen didn't “take all those responsible to task,” it would “cause reactions in Muslim countries and among Muslim communities in Europe.”
This is where Jytte Klausen's new book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, is so helpful: She meticulously documents the enormous diplomatic and political machinations that sprang into action to transform an editorial lark in faraway Jutland into a global campaign to censor Islam's critics. If 9/11 was the hard jihad using suicide bombers, the cartoon controversy was the soft jihad of “lawfare,” using diplomats and lawyers.
By the time it was done, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference had pressured the United Nations into passing a resolution outlawing “defamation of Islam” and had set up a permanent Islamophobia Observatory, a giant surveillance database on Western critics of Islam. But their real success was much bigger: They had managed to scare 99 per cent of the free world's media into self-censoring a major news story, without firing a shot.
To be sure, there was some violence. In February, 2006, alone, nearly 250 people were killed in anti-cartoon riots around the Muslim world. But that was just the soundtrack behind the real action at the UN.
Klausen provides startling facts about the Danish imams who became the front men for the global censorship campaign. She documents how they surreptitiously added three of their own cartoons – including one of Mohammed being sodomized by a dog – to the dozen actually published by the Jyllands-Posten when the imams toured the Arab world on their anti-Danish campaign. Ironically, the only cartoon the BBC broadcast during the whole affair was one of the imams' forgeries. The Cartoons documents the terrorist links of the imams, but then dismisses it, saying “most families have … bad apples.”
Hardly a page goes by where [the author] doesn't inject ideological clichés into her research, often with the flimsiest of relevance
And here is where Klausen's book falls down. Hardly a page goes by where she doesn't inject ideological clichés into her research, often with the flimsiest of relevance. She mocks Western leaders who warned of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; she uses the phrase “so-called war on terror.” Those are legitimate opinions, but what are they doing in a scholarly book about the cartoons? Even more dissonant is her personal attacks against critics of radical Islam, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
I'd call them tired liberal talking points, but Klausen clearly isn't liberal. True liberals are sympathetic to Muslim women refugees such as Hirsi Ali, or the anti- sharia campaigns of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Klausen accuses them and others of everything from “racialist fearmongering” to “dehumanizing” Muslims.
