The Big Question of the Jyllands-Posten Editor: If You Had to Do It All Over Again, Would You Have Printed the Mohammed Cartoons? Answer: “Hard to Tell!"

Philip Stone in Moscow June 7, 2006

The deputy editor-in-chief of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper at the center of the controversy in the printing of the Mohammed cartoons last September, peered out from the stage gazing onto hundreds of fellow editors from around the world and asked himself the question he knew they wanted to ask: “Would you do it over again?”
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And like everything about this issue there was no straight answer. “Hard to tell,” he said. Although he then confessed that if they had known then of the street attacks and loss of life that would follow then probably not.

But again he reemphasized the newspaper has never apologized for printing the newspaper, but rather apologized only if those printed cartoons caused any distress.

Jörgen Mikkelsen and culture editor Fleming Rose were in Moscow as part of a World Editors Forum discussion to discuss how freedom of expression can live side-by-side with religious values. Their appearance at the Forum was kept secret for security reasons.

Unfortunately, it was somewhat of a lost opportunity. The idea had been to have the two Danes and five others have a joint discussion about the issue and then open it up to the floor. The Danes had no friends on that stage and if they had any in the huge auditorium they kept to themselves!

Mikkelsen got to go first and made his various points but then all the other panelists were given too much time to make statements – nothing really much new in what they had to say – and by the time they were done there wasn’t really enough time for questions from the floor or interaction between the panelists.

Still Mikkelsen, who looked very drawn and tired, wanted to clear up a few points that obviously he has had to deal with over the past months. No, Jyllands-Posten is not owned by the Danish government, it is a non-socialist Liberal newspaper that has no government ties. No, neither he nor his editors had any cynical mean obsession to upset Muslims around the world, or, for that matter, Muslims just in Denmark. No, there was no intent to hurt the individual members of Islam, and no, there still will be no apology for printing the cartoons and for the real skeptics, no, there was no increase in the newspaper’s circulation because of the furor.

There was a distinguished panel from around the world that gave mostly long-winded views that we all knew already giving forth their views and while everything was mostly polite it seemed there had been very little movement in any particular camp.

Perhaps the most interesting and honest comment came from Eric Le Boucher, co-editor of Le Monde, who explained why his newspaper did not print the cartoons. “Let’s be honest about this,” he told the forum. “We have a correspondent in the Middle East and we didn’t want to get him in trouble.”Le Monde had editorialized condemning the comparison between terrorists and Mohammed.

The 12 cartoons, one of them showing Mohammed wearing a turban with a bomb and a burning fuse, outraged Muslims around the world. The 12 cartoonists are still under police protection and still continue to receive threats, Mikkelsen said.

Perhaps the most sobering account of how a local issue can affect lives around the world came from Hakeem Bello, executive editor of the National Interest in Nigeria. "Not a single newspaper in Nigeria published these cartoons, but we suffered the heaviest death toll of 160 civilians in the violence ignited by these caricatures," he said.

Imtiaz Alam, general secretary of the South Asian Free Media Association in Pakistan told the Jyllands-Posten editors, "Your cartoons were a form of hate speech.”

Akbar Ganji, the Iranian journalist awarded the World Association of Newspapers’ Golden Pen of Freedom award Monday after serving a six-year prison term in Iran, told the Danes, “From a moral point of view, you have the freedom to raise your hand for any reason, but you should not break my nose in so doing. And from a political point of view, don't you think there's enough conflict between civilizations already," he asked?

At the end of the day, nothing had changed but it’s probably a given that there aren’t going to be cartoons printed around the world these days that compare Mohammed to a terrorist. That message is well-received, no matter how much the Danish editors might hedge their bets.

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The Danish Cartoon Story Does Not Go Away - March 26, 2007

Flemming Rose, the culture editor at Jyllands-Posten who made the decision to print the 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammad that so upset the  Muslim world,  is to receive the inaugural Sappho prize given by the Free Press Society for combining “excellence in his work with courage and a refusal to compromise.”

And in Paris, a court has ruled that the editor of the magazine Charlie Hebdo was not guilty of insulting Muslims after the magazine had printed the cartoons last year.

Referring to the one cartoon that seemed to upset people the most – the one representing the prophet Mohammad wearing a turban with a bomb in it --  the court said, “The drawing, taken on its own, could be interpreted as shocking for followers of this religion. However, it had to be seen in the wider context of the magazine examining the issue of religious fundamentalism. Therefore, even if the cartoon is shocking or hurtful to Muslims, there was no deliberate intention to offend them.”

The French prosecutor had refused to bring a case against the magazine and the action was brought by two French Muslim organizations, one of whom says it will appeal.  That will take another year to reach court.