Dave Rubin: Were continuing our partnership with Learn Liberty this week, and joining me is an author, journalist, editor, and free-speech advocate, Flemming Rose. Welcome to The Rubin Report.

Flemming Rose: Nice to be here.

Rubin: Im glad to have you here, because you are sort of at the epicenter of everything that our current free speech battle is all about. I guess Im going to give you an open, easy question to start. How did you end up in the middle of this battle?

Rose: I didnt choose this fight. It was imposed upon me eleven years ago, when I was the editor responsible for publication of the so-called Danish Muhammad cartoons. They didnt come out of the blue, as some people sometimes think. They were published as a response to an ongoing conversation in Denmark and Western Europe about the problem of self-censorship when it comes to treating Islam.

Back then, I think I was pondering two questions. Is self-censorship taking place when it comes to dealing with Islam? Do we make a difference between Islam and other religions and ideologies, question number one? Question number two, if there is self-censorship, is that self-censorship based in reality, or is it just the consequence of a sick imagination not based in reality? Is the fear real, or is it fake? Eleven years later, I think we can say for sure the answer to both questions is yes. Yeah, there is self-censorship, and the self-censorship is based in reality because people were killed in Paris. I live with bodyguards 24/7 when Im back home in Denmark, so it is a real problem.

Rubin: Yeah, its so interesting to me that eleven years ago, 2005, you were addressing the idea of self-censorship, because thats obviously different than what we have here with the First Amendment, where the government cant censor us. My awakening over the last couple years about this has been about the self-censorship part, that we are doing it to ourselves. Just to back up to the specifics of what happened, you guys solicited cartoons from people, right?

Rose: Yes, we did, yes.

Rubin: Tell me about the process.

Rose: It started with a childrens book. A Danish writer was writing a book about the life of the prophet Muhammad. In Denmark, when you publish a childrens book, you need illustrations of the main character. I suppose it would be the same here.

Rubin: Same here; that goes across borders, yeah.

Rose: It turned out that the writer had difficulties finding an illustrator who wanted to take on the job. He went public saying, Ive written this book, but I had difficulties finding an illustrator because of fear. The guy who finally took on the job insisted on anonymity, which is a form of self-censorship. You do not want to appear under your real name, because you are afraid of what might happen to you.

In fact, this illustrator later acknowledged that he insisted on anonymity because he was afraid. He made a reference to the fate of Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker who was killed in 2004 because of a documentary he did that was critical of Islam.

Rubin: Who then many people know, the note to Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Rose: Exactly, yes.

Rubin: Who I think is one of the greatest people on planet Earth

Rose: Yes, who is a good friend of mine.

Rubin: Saying that they were coming after her next, yeah.

Rose: Exactly, and the second individual was Salman Rushdie, who in 1989 was the object of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and had to live in hiding for many years. That was the context, and some people were saying, Oh, this was just a media stunt by this childrens writer to sell more books. Other people were saying, No, that is self-censorship.

Through the commissioning of those cartoons, I wanted to put focus on this issue: is self-censorship taking place, or is it not, and how do illustrators and cartoonists in Denmark face this issue? I received twelve cartoons that were published September 30, 2005, and I wrote a short text laying out the rationale behind this journalistic project.

I dont think that it in any way transgressed what we usually do. As an editor and journalist, if you hear about a problem, you want to find out if its true or not. In this case, we asked people not to talk but to show, not to tell but to show, how they look at this issue of self-censorship. In fact, I think only three out of twelve cartoons depicted the prophet Muhammad, so there was no stereotyping, no demonizing, even though a lot of focus has been put on one cartoon, of the prophet with a bomb in his turban. That, to me, is in fact a depiction of reality. There are Muslims who commit violence and murder in the name of the prophet.

Rubin: Yeah, and not only was that theory proven, but it was put into action because over 200 people were subsequently killed throughout the world after they found out about these cartoons. Before we get to the aftermath, when you decided to do this, and youd done some controversial stuff before thatand well talk about reporting in the Soviet Union and that kind of stuffbut when you decided to do this, did you have any inkling that anything like this could possibly happen?

Rose: No, and anyone who today says, You should have known, I think its a rationalization after the fact. There was a lot of coincidences, and in fact cartoons of the prophet Muhammad had been published before without this kind of reaction. It just happened so that a coincidence of different factors, and the domestic political situation in different Muslim countries, exploited those cartoons to promote their own interests and agenda, and it all exploded.

Rubin: Yeah, and it probably had a little to do with just that it was sort of the beginnings of social media, so things could travel around the world quicker.

Rose: Yeah, but you know Dave, if this had

Rubin: Once people saw

Rose: If this had been today, I cant imagine. We didnt have Facebook. We didnt have Twitter back in 2005. We were just at the beginning of it.

Rubin: Just the beginning, yeah.

Rose: Today, it would have been even worse.

Rubin: Yeah, so you publish it. Now theres the reaction, theres some violence. What was it like for you at that time, and did the magazine do anything to help you, protect? Were they taking your side? You were the editor, so you were pretty high up, a pretty big deal.

Rose: Yeah, the whole newspaper stood behind me, but it took a while. The cartoons were published in September, and the violence only erupted at the end of January, beginning of February the following year. You had to build up. This also tells you a little bit about the fact that this was no coincidence. People had to plan, to promote. It wasnt spontaneous, just happening right after the publication.

Rubin: Do you have any evidence of that, or who do you think was actually

Rose: Yes, there are researchers who have been travelling and talking to people in different parts of the world where demonstrations happened, and its very clear that the government of Egypt was in the drivers seat in the beginning. The Fatah movement on the West Bank in the Palestinian territories were also behind this, because they were in an election up against Hamas, with the Islamist movement there, and they wanted to be the real protector of Muslims interests. Same in Pakistan, same in Qatar and Saudi Arabia; yes, absolutely, this was not a spontaneous uprising.

Usually I say, never have so many people reacted so violently to something that so few people in fact have seen. Very few people had seen the cartoons, and the man behind the attack on the Danish embassy in Tehran, in Iran, a Danish journalist, found him several months later and talked to him. When he showed him the cartoon of the prophet with a bomb in his turban, his angry reaction was not against the bomb, but he said, Why does the prophet look like a Sikh and not like an Arab?

Rubin: Wow, that tells you a lot right there. You make two interesting location points, because saying that Fatah, which was really the secular counterpart to Hamas

Rose: Secular.

Rubin: They were using it as, as you said, were protecting Islam. You had the secularists actually fanning the flames

Rose: Yes, and it was the same region.

Rubin: It was the secular. The same thing in Egypt, where Mubarak was the secular leader

Rose: He was up against the Muslim Brotherhood, who had been allowed to run an election for the first time in many years in the fall of 2005.

Rubin: Ive never thought of it in such interesting terms like that, but in a weird way, then, the secularists sometimes are more dangerous than the actual Islamists, because theyre playing both sides, right? Were you shocked that thats how it turned out?

Rose: I didnt know at the time. It took me some studying to figure out what actually had happened. It was very surreal. Sitting in Copenhagen in the beginning of February of 2006, and looking, watching TV and Danish embassies in flames in Beirut and Damascus, I couldnt make the connection in my mind. How come that people can go crazy like this several thousand kilometers away to something that had been published in a Danish newspaper three or four months before? It seemed surreal.

I would say, back then I didnt understand the gravity of it all. It took me several years, and it was only I would say in January of 2015 when my friends and colleagues at Charlie Hebdo in Paris were killed that I finally understood that I will have probably to live with security probably for the rest of my life. I somehow illusioned myself created an illusion that somehow it may go away, but it wont, and these people, they do have a long memory. I dont find it very traumatic myself, but I just know that I somehow will have to manage this situation.

Rubin: Yeah, so what was the reaction like? Your newspaper defended you, but what about the other publications within the country? Were people saying, Man, he just created a huge problem for us? Were they actually defending free speech at the time?

Rose: Not everybody; the country was divided, and it was really something new for Denmark, a small, peaceful country. We had never experienced anything like that, and the prime minister said it was the worst foreign policy crisis in Denmark since World War II. No, back then I was the object of a lot of criticism and anger, and I was labeled a fascist, Nazi, Islamophobe, and so on and so forth. Today, its different, I would say. Im less of a controversial figure today in Denmark than I was in 2006, because people have finally understood that this was not an empty provocation, just to stir up things. Its very difficult when you look around the world and see what is happening, that this was just an invention of my sick imagination.

The problem is real, and we have somehow to face it. I also had the time to write three books in fact now about this issue, one of them published in English about the whole thing, and free speech. I think people understand that Im not a warmonger, and Im not out to get Muslims, but I think Islam and Muslims have to accept the same kind of treatment as everybody else in our society.

In that sense, usually I make a little bit of a joke, but still its serious when I say that the publication of those cartoons was in fact an integration project in the sense that we were integrating Muslims in Denmark into a tradition of religious satire. Thereby we were saying to Muslims, We do not expect more of you. We do not expect less of you, but we expect of you exactly the same as we do of every other group and individual in Denmark, and therein lies an act of recognition. We say that youre not foreigners, youre not outsiders, you are part of society.

Rubin: Right, weve welcomed you to our society, but you have to be part of our society, not a separate part. Do you think that

Rose: You have to play by the same rules; free speech, we do have free speech, and it applies, the right to criticize and ridicule religion.

Rubin: Yeah, just to probably get rid of some of your naysayers real quick, you clearly do. I know this is the truth, but I just want you to say it so that people wont selectively hear anything. You do make the distinction between the ideas of Islam and Muslim people, correct?

Rose: Yes.

Rubin: You fully understand that difference, and all that?

Rose: Yes, I think any idea needs to be criticized and open for debate and scrutiny, but you shouldnt attack or demonize individuals and people.

Rubin: I feel silly sort of having to ask you that, but I know just for the nature of the way these things work

Rose: I dont have Muslims for breakfast.

Rubin: Okay, good.

Rose: In fact, some of the people who supported me back in 2006 now criticize me because I have supported the right of radical imams in Denmark to speak out and defend Sharia law and discrimination of women, as long as they do not do it in practice. We have the separation of words and deeds. I think people should have a right to say whatever they want, as long as they do not insight criminal activity and violence. I have in fact defended the radical imams, who would have liked to see me I guess in a different place than I am right now.

Rubin: Right, and thats what having principles when its hard to is all about. You are the very person who published these cartoons, now defending these peoples abilities to do things that are very against the West, very against your own personal beliefs. Is there some line there, or is it only violence? Im with you on that, that to me its the call to violence that then changes what free speech is. In a case where there are imams that we know, that are in Denmark and Sweden and some of these other countries, that are literally throwing for the overthrow of the government, for Sharia law to be implemented, horrible things about women and gay people and all those things, now theyre playing that line very closely to

Rose: As long as they do not incite violence, I think they should have a right to say whatever they want. In fact, I believe this not only as a matter of principle, but also as a matter of practical reality. You and I fight these people and their ideas in the best way, not through bans and criminalization, but through an open and free debate where we challenge them in the public space. I have never seen people change their beliefs just because they were criminalized.

Rubin: Right, just because of a ban or a punch or a

Rose: It drives them into the underground, and it makes them sexy, in a way, when they are not allowed to air all their bullshit in public. I believe its the most effective way to fight them. I believe that you should never criminalize words just because of their content, only because of what they call for, that is, incitement to violence. Apart from that, Im in favor of a very narrowly defined libel law, and Im also in favor of the protection of a right to privacy. I believe that privacy and free speech, in some instances, are two sides of the same coin. If you know that the government is surveilling you at home, you will speak less freely, and that is an invasion of your privacy.

Rubin: What would you say to the people, because this is the argument that I heard just in the last couple weeks when I was defending the right of Richard Spencer to speak his stuff and not get punched; as I said on Twitter, I have family members on both sides of my family who died in the Holocaust. I grew up knowing Holocaust survivors. Its not something that I take lightly, but I have to defend free speech when its uncomfortable speech.

People, of course, were saying I was a Nazi and a white supremacist and all of this nonsense, but a few people said, This is different. If these people wont play by the rules of decency in society, then we cant treat them with the same thing. Now, I dont agree with that, but what do you think is a good argument against that?

Rose: Oh, I think we did very well during the Cold War in Denmark, not banning Communism. We didnt even ban Nazism, though we were occupied by the Nazis for five years during the Second World War. Richard Spencer enjoys the same civil liberties and rights as you and me. You cannot make a distinction. If you go down that road, it just takes a new political majority, with people like Richard Spencer in power, and he can use the same principles against you and me, and against Muslims or blacks or other minorities.

Its very important to defend these principles for your enemies, because it just takes. Youre just an election away from a possible other majority that can use exactly the same kind of violence against you, that you are defending when its used against your enemies. I think this is what democracy is about, what a free and liberal foundation of our society is about, that you. This is what tolerance in fact is about. Tolerance means that you do not ban, and you do not use violence, threats, and intimidation against the things that you hate.

A lot of people hate the ideology and the values of Richard Spencer, but we should not use violence and try to intimidate and threaten him, and ban what hes saying. That is the key notion of tolerance in a democracy. Unfortunately, we have forgotten about that. Today tolerance means yes, you may have a right to say what you want, what you say, but I think you should shut up. Its become a tool to silence your opponents, but in fact it means that you have a right to say whatever you want as long as you do not use violence and bans.

Rubin: Right, and of course then theres the slippery slope argument which is that if you say, All right, you can punch a Nazi or silence a Nazi, and then you come along and defend their free speech, why cant they punch you, and why cant they punch me for having you on my show?

Rose: Exactly.

Rubin: The list goes on and on.

Rose: Yeah, and when you open that door, you never know when it stops. Thats very precarious in a young democracy, because sometimes a democracy wants to defend itself. I spent time in Russia after the fall, during its time as the Soviet Union, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and that transition in Russia from Communism to democracy in fact got off track because they started bending the rules in order to defend democracy against the enemies of democracy. Here you are, twenty years later, with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, and a lot less space for the individual to say and do what they want.

Rubin: Ive talked to a bunch of people. Ive had, I dont know. Do you know Tino Sanandaji, from [crosstalk]?

Rose: Yeah, Sweden, of course.

Rubin: Ive had him on, and I get a lot of mail from people in Sweden particularly, but Denmark also, talking about the rise of Islamism, and talking about how this is happening in the mosques, and its happening in the public square now, and we know that theres a rape epidemic and a whole series of problems. If the best defense is to let these people say what they want, isnt the problem that were still seeing these bad ideas rise? Is the problem of Islamism worse now than it was, say, five years ago in Denmark?

Rose: It is, but

Rubin: So then, isnt that an inherent conflict then, with the idea of sort of full free speech, which again, Im for?

Rose: No, I think you have to go further back to identify the root causes. We had an understanding. I taught immigrants the Danish language twenty-five, thirty years ago in Denmark. My wife is an immigrant herself, by the way, from the former Soviet Union. We had this understanding, of people arrive and they just stay long enough in our country, they will become like us, without telling them what the rules of the game are, what our values are, and so on and so forth.

Today, we understand that this doesnt happen in and by itself. Even if you learn the language, it doesnt mean that you start to support the values and the foundation of society. We have been too weak on communicating the foundation of our society, and why free speech matters to us, and why you have to accept that your religion may be the object of satire and criticism and so on and so forth, that homosexuality is not a criminal offense, that equality between the sexes is crucial. Its one of the most important things we achieved in the second half of the 20th century.

Were not willing to give that up, and we have been very bad at communicating these ideas. It all exploded during the cartoon crisis. I think thats why we still talk about those cartoons, because that conflict made it very clear, this clash of values. No, I dont think that there is an inherent conflict. We had anti-democratic movements and forces also during the Cold War. We had a legal Communist Party in Denmark that wanted to overthrow the government. They sat in parliament. They had their own newspapers. They had their own unions. They had their own festivals. They had their own schools, but we did not criminalize them. We confronted them, and had this debate in public, and it turned out in the end that reason and the values of liberty prevailed.

Rubin: Yeah, so this is really, sunlight is the best disinfectant argument

Rose: I think so.

Rubin: Eventually, these things will crumble because they dont lead us to actual human liberty and the things that people want, really.

Rose: Yeah, and if we want to get more Muslims on our side, we have to be consistent and make it clear to them that if there are individuals, dissenters within Muslim communities, they have an opportunity to leave their religion, and we have an obligation to protect them.

Rubin: I suspect I know the answer to this, but when Ive had certain people including Ayaan and Maajid Nawaz and other Muslim reformers like Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar and Ali Rizvi and Sarah Haider and many of these people on the show, theres been a theme, which is that the left abandoned them. They started talking about these ideas, not being bigots in that they are brown themselves, and that their families often are still practicing Muslims. In the case of Maajid, he still is Muslim. Some of them are ex-Muslims, but that they felt abandoned by the side that they wanted as their ally, or that should have been their natural ally. I suspect you got plenty of that as well.

Rose: Yes, absolutely. I think thats true, because if you look at the Enlightenment and the West, the criticism of religion came from the left, but the left abandoned its insistence on criticizing religion when Islam arrived and became a hot issue. I think thats [inaudible] to the core values of the left. Religion is power, and its a way to establish social control, whether it is by Christianity, by Islam, or by other kinds of religion.

In Denmark, the socialist party in Denmark, for fifty years they were in favor of getting rid of the blasphemy law. Today, they defend the blasphemy law, because they now believe its important to have it to protect Muslims, and I think thats crazy.

Rubin: Are people right now being prosecuted under the blasphemy law?

Rose: No, its a sleeping law, I would say, but we see that hate speech law. We also have a law against racism. We see that people are in fact being prosecuted for racism, for saying things that actually is blasphemyfor instance, comparing Islam with Nazism. Its criticism of ideas, not of individuals, so there also is a slippery slope in that direction.

Rubin: What do you make of the far right parties that seem to be growing throughout Europe? Im not sure, is there a far right party thats now gaining momentum in Denmark? I dont know specifically.

Rose: It depends on how to define it. I

Rubin: I dont like the phrase far right anymore

Rose: Right, exactly.

Rubin: Because our whole thing is so crossed up now, that I think what used to be far right is thought now as more center, because theyre the only ones talking about certain issues. That then brings in a lot of centrist people who otherwise wouldnt vote for the right.

Rose: We have two parties of this kind, one an old party that in fact is the second biggest party in Denmark, the Danish Peoples Party, which I would say is the second social democratic party opposed to immigration. We have a rather new party that is more conservative for small government, but also anti-immigration. I would not call them far right. They are not outside. They dont want to undermine the political order through violence. For instance, in Greece you have Golden Dawn, which is more a fascist movement, and they have nothing in common with Golden Dawn, even not with Marine Le Pen in France.

Rubin: Do you think that this is the route that Europe is going to go? It seems like its just going to be the reaction to what has happened. Merkel opened the doors to what, 1.1 million people or so?

Rose: Yeah.

Rubin: Even if 95 percent of them integrate perfectly, it doesnt take a lot of people. First of all, 1.1 is a lot of people, but it doesnt take a lot of people to sow a lot of chaos.

Rose: Yeah, a couple of points; I think polarization will intensify. This year, we will have an election in the Netherlands where a populist party, where Geert Wilders probably will not get to run the government, but he may become the biggest party.

Rubin: What do you think of someone like Geert? Do you I know hes sort of A lot of people that I think I trust, basically, say he really straddles the line between bigotry and

Rose: I had a debate with him. Absolutely, and we disagree on the two most fundamental building blocks of a democracy, equality and freedom; equality before the law, and the right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion. He is in favor, if he gets the power, to abandon the right to freedom of religion for Muslims, building mosques, having faith-based schools, and so on and so forth, and also the freedom of speech. He wants to ban the Koran.

Hes not willing to provide the same fundamental freedoms to Muslims as to Christians, atheists, and all individuals. We disagree on the building blocks, and the funny thing is that if he gets into power, he will use exactly the same hate speech law against Muslims that the current government has used against him, for demonizing Muslims as a

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Free Speech, Muhammad Cartoons, and Islamism in Europe: Dave Rubin's Interview with Flemming Rose - Learn Liberty (blog)