Cartoon Editor Disillusioned With U.S. Press

By Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 9, 2008

PALO ALTO, Calif. — A Danish newspaper editor who received death threats and is facing criminal charges for commissioning cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad is accusing his American counterparts of undermining free speech by failing to republish the cartoons when the issue prompted riots in Muslim countries two years ago.

"It reads on the top of the New York Times, 'All the News That's Fit to Print,' but it's very hard to argue that this was not news on February 1, 2006," the culture editor of Denmark's Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, said Wednesday night during a speech at Stanford University. Most American newspapers did not publish the cartoons, which include images of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban and of suicide bombers being greeted by the Muslim prophet in heaven.

"Europe has usually been criticized for being politically correct and on the defense when it comes to Islam, but more European newspapers published the cartoons," he said. "We might not have had the kind of ongoing crisis if more newspapers around the world would have published the cartoons at the same time because by doing so you would have drawn a clear line. ... Instead, it was pretty unclear what people in liberal democracies thought of this issue."

Mr. Rose scoffed at a Washington Post editor's claim that the cartoons were not needed to illustrate the story. The Danish editor said the Times later indicated that its reporters abroad might have been endangered by publishing the cartoons, an explanation Mr. Rose said was "fair" but should have been made clear to readers more promptly.

Asked by The New York Sun whether he was let down by the American press, Mr. Rose said, "Absolutely. I felt it was really very disappointing. ... If you look at the cartoons that have been published in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times and the New Yorker, I mean a lot of them are very offensive."

Before he spoke, a handful of Muslim students protested silently. One carried a sign saying, "Hate Speech Cannot Be Free Speech."