On New Year's Day, Kurt Westergaard and his granddaughter came close to losing their lives when an axe-wielding fanatic forced his way into their house. It was the latest in a string of attempted attacks that can be traced directly to the offence caused by Westergaard's cartoon for Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.
His cartoon depicted the prophet Muhammad in a turban with a stick of dynamite protruding from the top. Muslims failed to see Westergaard's cartoon as satire. Instead, they saw in it a defamatory and humiliating message: Muslims are terrorists. Humiliation is a devastating feeling. But most people who are insulted will accept an apology. If an apology had been forthcoming from the then prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, that probably would have been the end to it – but none came, and the humiliation was compounded.
Three months later several imams packed their briefcases and laptops and booked flights to the Middle East. They carried with them a 43-page document, created by a group of Danish Muslim clerics from multiple organisations. This so-called Akkari-Laban dossier was designed to present their case and solicit support for their outrage. Denmark became an "enemy of Islam" and this resulted in the nation's worst foreign policy crisis since the second world war.
Why did the editors of Jyllands-Posten want to mock Islam in this way? Some of us believed it was in bad taste and also cruel. Intentional humiliation is an aggressive act. As a journalist now living in the same town as Westergaard, I thought some at Jyllands-Posten had acted like petulant adolescents. Danes fail to perceive the fact that they have developed a society deeply suspicious of religion. This is the real issue between Denmark and Muslim extremists, not freedom of speech. The free society precept is merely an attempt to give the perpetrators the moral high ground when actually it is a smokescreen for a deeply rooted prejudice, not against Muslims, but against religion per se. Muslims are in love with their faith. And many Danes are suspicious of anyone who loves religion.
On the last day of the American Society for Muslim Advancement's conference in 2006, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten's cultural editor, who commissioned the Muhammad cartoons, agreed to meet the delegates and took more than an hour of questions. I witnessed this exchange and admired his honesty.
"Are you not at all religious?" someone asked him. "No. Most Danes are not religious," he responded. "Well then … can't you at least respect religious people?" "No, not really," Rose answered candidly. "Generally speaking, I think Danes are a little suspicious of religious people."
Danes are no more racist than any other western nation but many of them, especially intellectuals, have serious issues with religious believers. Westergaard has been visiting America and giving talks about his role in the 2005 Muhammad cartoon crisis. In New York on 30 September he told the audience that Muslims need to develop a sense of humour and an appreciation of satire. They need to understand that they are not "free of being mocked or being offended".
Watching the nightly news in February 2006 was a shocking affair for most Danes. They watched their flag burning in the streets of Damascus, Beirut and Tehran. They cringed as demonstrators screamed violent slogans and rioters attacked their embassies. Police fired on the crowds, resulting in more than 100 deaths.
Now the Danes won't back down and the few but fatally insane radical extremists will continue the fight. The first major reaction came in January 2008 when Danish police arrested a cell of extremists that were accused of planning Westergaard's assassination. There are 87 men in Denmark with the name Kurt Westergaard and all of them now have police protection. Four months later, suicide bombers attacked the Danish embassy in Islamabad, injuring 30 and killing six. Al-Qaida took credit for the attack, claiming it was retaliation for the cartoons and the 700 Danish troops in Afghanistan. In October 2008, two men were convicted in Danish courts of preparing a terrorist attack.
This time, Westergaard's attacker was caught – but someone else is out there waiting for an opportunity to strike again.