How the West failed the test of the Danish cartoons controversy
Twenty years on, Europe has embraced Islamic blasphemy codes and abandoned free speech.
How did this happen? How did a handful of cartoons sequestered away in the culture section of a newspaper that few outside of Denmark had heard of lead to a global conflagration and hundreds of deaths? By the time the unrest had been brought under control, well over 200 people had been killed in clashes with security forces.
The answer lies in the way in which the cartoons controversy drew deeply on cultural forces reshaping societies in the West and beyond. It was fuelled above all by an increasingly assertive and intolerant form of Islamic activism. This was exacerbated by Western elites’ abandonment of fundamental, universal freedoms, especially freedom of speech, and their embrace of cultural relativism and identity politics.
Need I remind anyone that cartoons don’t kill people, humorless religious fanatics do
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