Agora

I kid you not. This map shows where the - to quote YAAFM - "harbingers of hate, the sword wielding sand people, the mad lovers of Muhammed, the Moslems" are destroying their own property to protest… Cartoons. Printed in Denmark. Six months ago. How stupid is that? It’s even got fucking body counts. Apparently, when we reach a billion, the fun stops. We’ll be out of Muhammed turbanists.

Tune in for the loony tunes.

As Homer Simpson would say: D’oh!

I am so glad I read this post by Michelle Malkin. Look at the photos. I thought it was just the ones in Denmark whose neural pathways had gone haywire.

No, I know it’s not that bad in Denmark. But sometimes I just feel like huddling up and start crying. What’s wrong with these people?

This post just to inform everyone that the rumour started by Reuters is false. No new apology has been issued in the Saudi Media. Jyllands-Posten does not know who published it.

Their nominal apology (aka "we’re sorry you’re whining crybabies) still stands though.

More at LGF

Link to haaretz where J-P denies having published the ads in the Saudi Media.

Links to blogs that have spread this rumour with comments disabled (let’s hope they watch their logs or technorati):

http://yournewreality.blogspot.com/2006/02/danish-newspaper-that-started-mohammed.html

http://japanesefurniture.bloggaway.com/?p=49

http://orvstuff.messagemonster.com/sorry.htm

http://sierra.bloggers4ever.com/?p=269

http://www.kitchencabinetreviews.com/toddler/2006/02/saudi_papers_publish_danish_pa.html

http://kramer1854.livejournal.com/1564.html

http://www.kitchencabinetreviews.com/business_plan/2006/02/saudi_papers_publish_danish_pa.html

Translator’s note: This is the next in the series of columns that Per Nyholm is doing for Jyllands-Posten, the last of which was entitled "We are being pissed upon" which is available here. The column before that one is here.

Jyllands-Posten, Friday, February 17, 2006

My Day in Florence

By Per Nyholm

(Florence) The days are growing longer and milder. The first smells of spring are in the air. Soon the delights of Summer will be here.

Of course there are problems, even serious ones, but sometimes even they need to be put aside for a spell. Maybe then, one returns and finds that they have grown smaller by the absence. Maybe one achieves greater clarity by thinking in another direction.

This morning, feeling utterly disgusted with the Moslem rebellion (which, praise the Lord, is not a Danish Moslem rebellion), I boarded the train from Rome for Florence. I intended to take a walk, have some brunch and see the newly renovated Statue of David. A day of culture, in other words - no wars, no hysteria, no hatred.

On the train, I read an article by the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in which he encourages the values of respect, tolerance and diversity, all very fine values which I am happy to support. And I said to myself: "Fine, mr. President! What are you doing for Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali? What are you doing to hinder the group of madmen who reportedly live in your country and which has pledged to slaughter Danes living there - all because a Danish newspaper printed some cartoons, seen by few Indonesians?"

If you want respect, mr. President, tell your countrymen that these cartoons are protected by Danish law and that there is no case. Tell publicly what you very well know privately, that in a proper democracy one may insult Islam, Christianity, Judaism and every other religion. There is no shall, but you may. Freedom isn’t free, mr. President, just ask the Danes this very moment.

I know, mr. President that neither can you nor will you do this and that is the problem. A problem you share with other rulers from the Phillipines across Central Asia to the Middle East and Africa. The problem - except from a few lying Imams - is not in Denmark, but in the Moslem world where religion isn’t a private matter - where Mullahs are allowed to pester the believers in their homes, in their workplaces and in government. Only this all-encompassing religiousity can explain how 12 rather innocous cartoons can lead us to the present, a place where several have died on account of them.

You complain, mr. President - with no small justification - about the Islamophobia of The West. In connection with that, some have complained of a drawing of Muhammed with a bomblike turban as being the most offensive. Very well, what do you think hurts Islam the most? The cartoon or this: that millions of viewers watch crazed and savage madmen decapitate their victims with knives or slaughter thousands of innocents, Moslems included, from New York to Iraq and Bali?

Respectfully, mr. President, these killings and threats are of little use. If you say we can’t show the likeness, or alleged likeness, of Muhammed in Denmark, I say: our rights are not up for discussion. Moslem repressions will not be accepted as the basis for diminishing the foundations of Western Democracy - a system, I might add, which also many Moslems strive for and which you - as far as I know - in no small degree try to uphold.

Those were my thoughts on the train, travelling north through the mild Italian landscape - and here in Florence I wonder if not we in Denmark should abolish the People’s Church and abolish all official recognition of religion. The State could then take care of our churches - as they do all cultural monuments - but the preaching of the word should be with free clerics, paid by their flocks, who spread the word - be it Christian, Moslem, Jewish or something else - under the protection and abiding by the responsibilities of the normal secular laws.

I fancy that by so seperating politics and religion it would help the plight of the free and critical citizens, among these thousands of well integrated Moslems, used by a faltering priesthood in their, hopefully, doomed attempt to - by leveraging the Muhammed cartoons - keep their failing power over the Moslem Mind.

Having finished brunch I take the long way past San Lorenzo to pay my respects to Niels Steensen of Copenhagen, beatified by the Catholics as Steno. I then visit the Academy to see the newly restored David.

There I am, delighted and breathtaken, in front of a piece of art which in a world of Puritans would be used to pave roads - Michaelangelo’s naked youth, gracefully nonchalant, natural yet glorious, watching the fallen Goliat just smithen by his sling.

David is one of the great pieces of art of Western Civilization, not only because it is technically perfect but because it holds in it a message - that the weak and naked by using his mind and inherent humanity may triumph against the might of boasting brutality, against those whose only language is that of threats, destruction and murder.

Today was a good day in Florence.

PS: I would like to thank seperately everyone who writes to me. This time I cannot. Last week’s column, "We are being pissed upon", has as of this moment resulted in 274 comments of which four were negative, five or six were sceptical and the rest positive. I had reactions from China to Costa Rica, from the United States to Australia and from Sweden to South Africa. So you’ll have to consider this my sincere "thank you".

Jyllands-Posten, Friday, February 8, 2006

Education of the Mind

By Per Nyholm

Denmarks needs to see beyond money and growth rates and begin an education in the life of the intellect, where society is a commitment carrying with it more duties than responsibilities.

(Rome) After the succesful Nazi grab for power in Germany in 1933, it became costumary for Danish Foreign Ministers, first P. Munch and then Erik Scavenius during the second world war, to regularly remind leading members of the press of the need for delicacy in dealing with the Germans.

Both Munch and Scavenius preferred not to hear about concentration camps or the mass murder of Jews and Hitler’s political adversaries. They would much rather hear about amazing German triumphs, of the German economic miracle and of new autobahns.

Journalists who brought down the wrath of the German Ambassador upon themselves were cast out. Among these was the foreign correspondent of Berlingske Tidende (Danish Conservative Daily), Nicolas Blædel. Many years later, the firing of him made the honorable Erik Seidenfaden vent his wroth, not only on Berlingske Tidende but also on Politiken (Danish Radical Daily) which in 1940 smeared Blædel for "a mistaken line of inquiry into foreign affairs, which has in no way benefited Danish interests."

After the war, free thinking journalists were asked to be mindful of of the Soviet Union. Especially The Left was more than happy to oblige and continued this tradition untill the disappearance of European Communism in 1989. During this period the "efficient entrepeneurial sector" was as eager to be helpful. The respect for Democracy was nowhere near as common as the childrens’ books would have us believe.

The workings of the same system is recognizable in connection with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammed caricatures though we are not dealing with aggressive super powers at our back door but with remote, substandard regimes who might be able to boycot Danish cheese but apart from that are absolutely baffled on the point of how to deal with the cartoons. I think Jyllands-Posten was well within its rights to publish said cartoons and all the whining and the threats and the torching of our embassies only acts to confirm my opinion.

The cartoons are legal and clearly within the bounds of the freedom of the press which naturally may seem offending to political, religious and other interests. It must be so. The freedom of the press is not a bargaining chip in democratic societies.

But the confirmation of my conviction is tempered by sorrow. I have always been well received in the Arab countries and I am especially moved by the plight of the Palestinians - now a people without a country.

That anger and despair rules the Arab Street is no wonder. People there are poor beyond belief and have gone from defeat to defeat; the Crusades, the dissolution of the Caliphate, German, French and English Colonialism, the Jewish immigration to Palestine.

That is a road of tears which in no small part is due to Islam remaining the core of a society which increasingly came under pressure, ending in a state of fossilisation and single-minded regard for The Beyond; a contrast to The West which is increasingly focused on the here-and-now. These people shall now, by the hands of manipulating religious leaders, suffer a new, unnecessary defeat.

Because about the cartoons there is only this to say: they cannot be undone.

Another perceived injustice will burrow into the Arab mind, a harsh diet for people not motivated by Democracy and Freedom but Supreme Justice.

The Moslems in Denmark have remarkably poor leaders, which is another in the line of reasons why we must educate Danish Imams in order to further an interpretation of the Quran in keeping with the times, to be based around public Mosques, schools and other institutions.

Danes are generally open-minded and cheerful, be they Protestants, Catholics, Jews or something else. We have space for the 200000 Moslems of whom we know that the great majority are peaceful and good citizens.

But there are bottom-feeders on both sides. Talk is heard of Danish Pigs and Moslem Vermin. Some use such harsh language that it reminds one of certain Germans immediately before the Kristallnacht. Events - splintered shop windows, people beaten, fear, hate - the things that please the harbingers of civil strife.

What is needed is an extensive debate: why do the great majority of intellectuals not get what is at stake with these cartoons, whose publication they criticise? How do we integrate the Moslems into the Danish society at large? How can we dampen the hate in some Danish circles towards Islam and vice versa?

Many - among those the infamous Imams and the scarecrows of the extreme right - simply need an education in how to coexist with people different from themselves. But we mustn’t make the mistake of equipping the immigrants with special rights. They may live their lives as they chose but they are not to be given privileges that are not available to natives nor are laws to be passed on their account which are not in keeping with the traditions of the host country. We must strive for a mutual, broad tolerance which (in the word of Fernando Savater) does not tolerate everything.

These goals are not furthered by too quickly making technicians, gas station attendants, physicists, and computer experts out of people without instilling into them some sense of community. On this count, the current administration has not been helpful.

But none can fault the Prime Minister for his actions these last troubled days - he has seen what neither Munch nor Scavenius ever saw. But we need to move on, get past the talk of money and growth rates. We need an education of the mind, an education in the life of the intellect. We need to learn that society is a commitment which brings with it more duties than rights.