'When the Violence Erupted, I Became the Scapegoat'

Here's a transcript of Flemming Rose's answer to a questioner who asks whether he would have published the controversial Danish cartoons if he had known how Muslims would react:

Questioner: My question is for Mr. Rose: Had you known the scope of terrorism and crime that resulted from publishing the Mohammed cartoons before publishing them, would you have still published them, and what would be your reasoning?

Flemming Rose: First time I get that question. No, I didn’t know, and the people who today say that I should have known, that it was some kind of automatic reaction—as if you push a button—they are just not honest. In the fall of 2005, before all hell broke loose in the Middle East, a very prominent Danish expert on Islam said, after the publication of the cartoons, that this is never going to be a big international issue—it’s too small. And the fact of the matter is that cartoons of the prophet Muhammad have been published before without triggering these kind of reactions.

You know, if I say that in light of the violence that erupted that I wouldn’t do it, I think I would send a very bad signal to all kind of violent people, basically telling them that if you threaten, intimidate and use enough violence, I will do exactly as you please.

On the other hand, of course, I am not suicidal. As I said to Dave, it is not nice to receive death threats in the emails. And, I mean, I don’t think that you should — If you know how people will react in advance, you should think about the consequences of what you say, but I just think here, I think the problem was that when the violence erupted, I became the scapegoat, and it was as if a lot of people in the West thought that Muslims belong to a different species, that they don’t have a mind and a brain to reason and make a decision about how they are going to react, as if it’s just, you know, they are like animals or like small children, they are not able to make a decision for themselves about how to react to an offensive cartoon. And therefore I was the perpetrator and not the people who committed the actual violence. And I think that was a problem.

And there was Original Sin—I think that was the phrase Greg Lukianoff from FIRE used at some point—if most newspapers in the West back then had republished the cartoons, not as an act of support, because publication does not mean endorsement, to a publisher. You can still write an editorial saying, you know, “We disagree with the decision to publish, but they are newsworthy and people have to make a decision for themselves what they think about these cartoons,” and you are not taking your readers seriously if you believe that you can only show them things that they like.

And I think The New York Times, they made a huge mistake. It reads on the top of The New York Times, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” And February 1st, 2006, the cartoons, they were news item number one in the world, but they decided not to publish them—as most of the big American newspapers did. And I think that was a real mistake. If everybody had published then, as basically saying, “This is the right thing to do, we may not agree with the content of the cartoons, but it’s important to publish them because they are in the news,” then you would have — we might have been in a different place now, because today, nobody, not even in Europe, publish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Not the newspaper where I used to work at, Jyllands-Posten, they don’t do it anymore.

There’s only one newspaper in Europe that did this, Charlie Hebdo, and they were killed.

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The panelists are Steve Simpson, director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute and editor of "Defending Free Speech"; Flemming Rose, author of "Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech," and Dave Rubin, creator and host of the Rubin Report. The event, "Free Speech Under Attack," took place at Objectivist Summer Conference 2017 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, June 13, 2017.

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