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Naser Khader, a Middle East Forum writing fellow, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and former member of the Dutch Parliament, spoke to an August 11th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) about the significance of the recent Koran burnings in Sweden and Denmark. The following is a summary of his comments:
In 2001, Khader was elected the first Danish Parliament member from an Arab background. In 2006, Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, printed twelve drawings of the Islamic prophet Mohammed following statements by several cartoonists that they “did not dare” to depict him. The paper’s editor explained that in a “secular democracy [with] freedom of expression . . . you have to be ready to accept insult, mockery and ridicule.”
The images unleashed a torrent of extreme reactions from the Islamic world. Numerous Danish imams traveled to Islamic countries to instigate protests, eleven Muslim countries sued the newspaper, ambassadors were recalled, Danish goods boycotted, Muslim rioted in Denmark, and people were killed. “Denmark was suddenly thrown into the worst foreign policy crisis since the Second World War.”
To impose blasphemy laws in Denmark, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) applied diplomatic pressure, which amounted to interference with the free media.
“The drawings prompted impetus from eleven Muslim countries to request a meeting with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and to hold the newspaper responsible before the law. Of course, our then-prime minister could not do that and replied with a reference to our constitution that guaranteed freedom of speech. He said that the Danish government could and would not interfere with the free media.”
At Khader’s urging, the Danish government refused to abridge the freedom of speech as guaranteed in the country’s constitution. Confronted by Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, the Danish government stood firm in its belief, even as the crisis escalated.
The OIC, the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the UN, pressed for enforcement of Denmark’s blasphemy clause, a broadly worded law in the Danish Penal Code. The OIC is interested in accruing more power and, after the Arab Spring, they needed a foreign enemy to distract from troubles within their own ranks. Repeal of the blasphemy law in Denmark had been under way since the mid-1970s. In 2017, Denmark abolished the blasphemy clause.
Fast forward to 2023. The recent Koran burnings in Denmark and Sweden are about much more than assaults on freedom of speech and expression. Khader suggested that Russia may be behind the crisis, noting that “the first Quran burning was initiated by Russia to prevent the US [from being] successful with admitting Sweden to NATO and make an Abraham deal with the Saudis.”
“We know that the first Quran burning incident in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, was funded by a far-right journalist with links to Russia.”
Russia, in the speaker’s view, has a twofold strategy: (1) Prevent Sweden’s membership in NATO, and (2) impede the normalization deal between the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel. Russia initiated the Koran burning in Sweden as its first attempt to prevent the achievement of both goals and provoke a crisis against the West similar to 2006’s cartoon crisis.
The Koran burnings provided a pretext for the president of NATO member Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to block Sweden’s application for membership. Erdoğan is exploiting the crisis to extract a visa agreement from the EU that would permit Turkish citizens to travel freely through Europe. He is also exerting pressure on Sweden, with its large anti-Erdoğan Kurdish population, to curtail the activities of Kurdish organizations there.
The Koran burnings provided a pretext for the president of NATO member Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to block Sweden’s application for membership.
Although Arab media accused Sweden and Denmark of orchestrating the burnings as evidence of the countries’ “Islamophobia,” no state agents were in fact involved. Even though people should read books rather than burn them, the Koran burnings were committed by “private individuals whose nonviolent expressions are intended to convey a message which . . . is part of free speech.” Extremists who react to the burnings with intimidation and violence are wrong to think they can enforce “religious taboos” on a free people.
“In July two weeks ago, an Iranian citizen living in Denmark burned the Danish and the Swedish flags as well as the Bible and the Torah in the front of the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen and at the same time, he praised the Ayatollah Khomeini in the process, but nobody cared about this attempt to provoke. No Danish cared about it. No one used violence and the Iranian guy was not arrested.”
Beyond public condemnation of the act from community leaders, the Jewish community did not react, much less violently; there were no arrests. The OIC was noticeably silent regarding the Torah and Bible burnings. The Iranian Muslim’s goal was to expose Western hypocrisy, yet “rather than demonstrating Danish hypocrisy, which was his goal, he managed to show how a free society committed to both free speech and tolerance can handle offensive ideas without violence.”
In contrast, at present, “in the face of violence and international backlash,” free speech is up for debate in Sweden and Denmark. Both governments are now “bowing to intimidation” and seeking to enact legislation to accommodate the OIC by “explor[ing] legal remedies” against future Koran burnings. “Once the democracies compromise on principles, authoritarian states will not respond with ... gratitude, but demand more,” as was the case with both the OIC and Turkey, also an OIC member, which responded to the announcement by demanding more concessions. In the last two weeks, government leaders in Sweden and Denmark handed more power to the OIC by announcing their intention to “revise the criminal code or reintroduce some form of a new blasphemy clause.”
The Muslims who react violently against Koran burnings should do what the Danes and the Jewish community did: ignore it.
Democratic countries like Sweden and Denmark cannot justify compromising on freedom of speech as a response to OIC criticism. The leaders of these democratic countries refuse to see that the West is engaged in a global struggle to defend its values against the OIC assault. The Muslims who react violently against Koran burnings should do what the Danes and the Jewish community did: ignore it. “As long as [the Muslims] get angry, people will burn more Korans.”
Free speech “makes the world more tolerant, more equal, and more free.” Government leaders and their citizens who cower under threats when they are “tempted to sacrifice this principle” need only contrast the freedom in Western democracies with authoritarian regimes such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Former U.S. president Truman said, “Freedom is not free.” Denmark and Sweden’s “defection from the core liberal principle is a dark day for the global fight for free speech.”
