The Freedom to Offend

The Freedom to Offend: Travel Writer Wren Crandall Examines the Political, Philosophical and Personal Contexts of Race Relations in Denmark.

Kirk Westergaard is many things. One thing, perhaps his favorite, is to be a doting grandfather to his 5-year-old granddaughter.

The little girl came for a sleepover to her grandparents’ house, on the outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark, on New Year’s Day. Westergaard is also the controversial cartoonist of the 2005 Jyllands-Posten cartoon that infamously depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped bomb. Since the cartoon’s initial publication, Westergaard’s life has been threatened many times, and the police have been keeping him and his house under close watch. But on this day, the first one of the New Year, he felt safe.

He did not expect a 28-year-old Somali man at his front door, waving an axe and screaming in poor Danish about revenge. The 75 year old took his granddaughter and ran to a fortified safe room in his house. He sounded his panic button and clutched the frightened little girl as his attacker hacked at his front door with the axe and yelled threats. Within two minutes, the police surrounded the scene and shot the attacker. They carted him away, handcuffed and on a gurney, to the hospital.

During my Student Abroad exchange, I lived in Aarhus and attended their local university. I took graduate classes in philosophy and conflict theory, including one that focused on exactly the topic of this article. Further, I was immersed in Danish culture (in all its contractions), living with an upper-middle Danish family by day and partying in the Arab-Immigrant-Student section of town by night.

While I have not met Westergaard, the Muslim cartoon, immigration and identity politics remained hotly debated in Aarhus during my time there. There are strong arguments to support Westergaard’s cartoon, the sharpest aspects center on a defense of freedom of speech. This is especially so when one’s national myth of liberal democracy is at stake. But this narrow focus strategically forces out deeper proactive, ethical dialogue. In doing so, we have ignore the profound questions of inclusion, exclusion and human dignity, the questions of what we ‘ought’ do.

Denmark is struggling with its own homegrown contradictions. A powerful paradox emerges quickly when combining a homogeneous Christian nationalist state with the pressure of a modern, multicultural democracy. Under EU obligations, Denmark is required to take in refugees. The Danes have done so with great hesitation, creating some of the most strict family reunification laws on the globe in efforts to discourage immigration. Public opinion about the largely Somali and Palestinian refugees remains largely grave suspicion, not compassion, with overtones of paranoia.

Largely left out as the flock of European colonizers spread their wings, the entire Scandinavian region has remained relatively unscathed as the post-colonial violence, corruption, and collective guilt came home to roost by the 1960s-1970s. While there is the exception of Danish-controlled Greenland and Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish issues with the Sami Arctic peoples, Scandinavia has built strong national identity myths. It is seen, particularly in Denmark, as a pure land of reserved, white liberal sophistication; a peaceful, largely homogenous social democratic culture with Viking and Christian roots. Scandinavians see themselves as a land set apart from the messy racial and class conflicts periodically rocking the rest of the Western World.

Racism, immigration and identity politics in Denmark are certainly complex. As a nation, it claims to be based on principles of equality for citizens and non-citizens. Under Danish law, discrimination based on race, age, gender, sexual orientation, disability or religion is illegal. It also belongs to all international human rights conventions and is guided by European Union anti- discrimination directives. Yet, despite this outward appearance of inclusion, Denmark falls short in living up to principles of non-discrimination in both its political institutions and broader Danish society.

This lapse of principles towards its immigrant population extends into how the state approaches employment, education, housing, health care, family reunification and asylum policies, counter terrorism, as well as other political and legislative developments. Particularly glaring is the Danish media’s portrayal of its minorities in print, radio and online.

The reactive cry for the Danish freedom to offend has captured the imagination and egos of the rest of the Western World. However, the freedom to offend doesn’t mask the smell of something rotten in Denmark: its pervasive culture of racism and xenophobia. Nor does this freedom to be provocative mean we ought to provoke without the substance to back up our claims. Estimates of worldwide Muslim populations range from 1.2 billion to 1. 66 billion. While a very small fraction of these have produced terrible acts of violence and terrorism worldwide, this violence is not indicative of Islamic ideology as a whole. In fact, contrary to the common portrayal of the bomb-plotting Muslim ‘everyman’, statistically approx. 90% of Muslims worldwide are against the killing of civilians for humanitarian and religious reasons (according to a recent Gallup poll).

It is easy to have an irrational fear of the “Other” when you hardly know them. There are many critical and underreported perspectives coming from Muslim thinkers and activists who attempt proactive dialogue building. Such groups include the Muslim feminist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises in France, Palestinian pacifist Nafez Assaily, who promotes creative Muslim non-violent activism and former Al Qaeda member Tawfik Hamid, who now tours the world promoting peace. These groups work to break down this image of the evil Other we have built for our Muslim neighbors and that they themselves have internalized. Alternative and peaceful voices are there in the Muslim community; but the Western world is often deaf to them.

You can point out to Danes that violence and religious extremism are potential products of this Zizekian fantasy about the ‘Other’. But outside of academic ivory towers, they will likely not believe you. I spent many nights in intense debate with my Danish host father over an after-supper Scotch. A local architect in Aarhus, he designs many of the hospitals and schools on the Jylland (or mainland) of the country. He is an educated, articulate man, who felt intense patriotism for everything Danish. This includes Danish design, film, the country’s leadership of NATO, and the pioneering of wind power technology. He ate only organic food, believed in artisanship over the mass produced and openly supported gay marriage. His leftward-lean ended and took a sharp, sudden turn for the right the instant immigrants and/or Arabs came up.

This is where rationality and the illusion of tolerance would arrive at a screeching stop. Despite the fact communities in Aarhus are strictly ghettoized along racial and socio-economic lines, and knowing no Muslims personally, no sweeping general statement was too broad for my host father. I was told Aarhus Muslims (and worldwide) were dangerous, violent fanatics. “No respect for women” and “They are not really refugees” are other common misconceptions. All Muslim men, my host father claimed, are inherently inclined to abuse women. He argued the only immigration policy Denmark needed was one of strict repatriation. “Help them out for a while”, he said, “and then send them home”.

Having partially justified concerns over immigration or aspects of Islamic culture is one thing. These serious issues potentially threaten the identity and social cohesion of a country. Unfortunately, a clear line is crossed when one person or group begin ascribing inherent characteristics to another. This is when ‘another’ becomes ‘The Other’.

Muslims as inherently violent or dishonest? Really? Admittedly, English is my host father’s second language. So I wonder whether the gravity and true meaning of the word “inherent” may have escaped him. He refused to believe I had many Muslim friends back home in Saint John, that I had bonded with some of the Danish-Arab community in Aarhus, or that I had toured the local Mosque in a UNBSJ course studying Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Furthermore, he refused to separate ‘Muslim’ from ‘Arab’ from “Immigrant’. Concern about one group applied to all. This includes Danish minorities from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Thailand, Yugoslavia, China, Russia, Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Greece.

At worst, he accused me of co-operating and endorsing religious fanatics. At best, he leveled that I was terribly naïve. He even asked if I was secretly an Arab, due to my skin tone and defense of Islam. I explained all this to my professor of conflict studies, Henrik Joker Bjerre, at the University of Aarhus. I inquired as to whether my host father’s opinions are typical of Danish public perception.

Professor Bjerre told me this was in fact very typical of public perception. The reasons are complex. However, a large part of it can be traced to the ghettoization of minority groups, lack of integrative programs for new immigrants, biased media reporting and the keeping of Christianity as Denmark’ s national religion. Danish-Arabs, Somali and other minorities are treated in nearly every aspect as second-class citizens. The Muslim-bomb cartoon he claims, happened not out of a desire to express freedom of speech. Rather it stemmed from various xenophobic sub-texts.

This sub-text, Prof. Bjerre argues, involves the ‘cultural pastime or hobby’ in Denmark of mocking, provoking and disrespecting their Muslim population. Criminality and religious fundamentalism in the immigrant community has in part risen from the identity created by this extreme circumstance of Danish exclusion/inclusion.

This leads back to the two main characters in this story. Kirk Westergaard and his axe-wielding Somalian. Indeed it is an alarming tale that should not have happened. No one should have to face down the attack Mr. Westergaard and his little granddaughter did. People should, especially in the press, have the fundamental right to say what they want, and thus the freedom to offend. With such rights comes responsibility. Here enters the ethical question in what we “ought” to do. We ought to build cultural bridges rather than burn them.

Westergaard, in being attacked and threatened, is certainly a victim. Nevertheless, the content and context of his cartoon has an uglier side, one that reeks of institutional racism and second-class citizenship. Through clever ignorance and crude caricatures, he invoked the legal and political freedom to offend. By doing so, he, as well as my host father for similar reasons, have accidently inked in crude caricatures of themselves. Their opinions highlight the pervasiveness of Danish racism. They create new victims by cultivating division. Evidently, the freedom to offend does not extend to ethics.