Den første gang har jeg glemt at fjerne --. Er ikke helt sikker
hvilken virkning det har på nogen nyhedslæsere. Derfor en anden gang.
During the first transmission, I forgot to remove --. I'm not quite
sure which effect this had on some newsreaders. Therefore a second
transmission.
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ARIEL BOLUDOVSKY schrieb:
CBS Does Denmark
But doesn't bother to get the story right.
by Henrik Bering
03/06/2006, Volume 011, Issue 24
Copenhagen
When 60 Minutes shows up on your doorstep, you have reason to fear for
your good name and reputation. The Danes learned this last week, when
reporter Bob Simon and his team of cameramen descended on the country
to
pass judgment in the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons. The result
of their labors was a 12-minute segment that displayed all the
customary
60 Minutes arrogance and superficiality. In the report, the respected
Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which originally printed the cartoons,
came
across as a publication hellbent on gratuitously offending millions of
Muslims around the world, while the Danes themselves were portrayed as
naive, full of themselves, xenophobic, and way too blonde for their own
good. Did we forget provincial? Add that to the list of Danish foibles,
too.
The 12 cartoons were commissioned last fall when the editors of the
Jyllands-Posten, feeling that a note of fear and self-censorship had
crept into the Danish public discussion of matters Islamic, decided to
test whether this was true. (Specifically, a writer of children's books
had reported difficulty in finding an illustrator for a
life-of-Muhammad
volume.)
After an initial flap when the cartoons came out in the paper's
September
30, 2005, edition, nothing much happened for months. Then a delegation
of
fundamentalist imams from Denmark decided to tour the Middle East,
stirring up hatred. Unsure that the original, rather lame cartoons
would
be sufficiently incendiary, the imams added three crude images to the
portfolio, including one purportedly of the prophet Muhammad disguised
as
a pig. (It turned out to be a photocopied picture of a man in a pig
mask
from a rural French hog-calling contest.) That certainly did the trick.
The Danes were suddenly the most hated people on Earth, with their
embassies under attack, their flag being burned, and their
consciousness
being raised by lectures on religious tolerance from Iran, Saudi
Arabia,
and other beacons of enlightenment.
Among the participants in the 60 Minutes trashing of Denmark was Ahmed
Abu-Laban, a Palestinian refugee and self-appointed spokesman of Danish
Muslims, who instigated the tour of the Middle East and whose name has
been linked to some very unpleasant groups and individuals in the
Middle
East. But rather than explore Laban's background and grill him in depth
on the question of the added cartoons, CBS treated him with kid gloves
as
an aggrieved individual. Not a word about his contacts, nor of the fact
that he has been speaking with a forked tongue, urging dialogue in his
Friday prayers in Denmark, while inciting confrontation and boycott
when
talking to Middle Eastern audiences. All this is easily obtainable
information, which CBS chose to ignore.
Unfortunately, the editors of the Jyllands-Posten, having received a
forewarning about the likely drift of the program and reportedly in a
state of shellshock after weeks of criticism, chose not to appear on
the
show. With death-threats and fatwas issued against the cartoonists, the
paper had thrown in the towel and issued public regrets for having
offended Muslims.
With the main players not being on hand to defend the rights of a free
press, this task was left to Tøger Seidenfaden, editor in chief of a
rival paper, the liberal Politiken, which has been in the forefront of
condemning the publication of the cartoons and whose endorsement of the
principle of freedom of speech was accordingly less than ringing. Some
suggest that the problem with Jyllands-Posten is that, not being left-
wing, it is not perceived to merit the kind of unqualified support from
Seidenfaden and his colleagues in the Danish press that Salman Rushdie
received when the fatwa was issued against him by the mullahs in Tehran
back in 1989 over his novel The Satanic Verses.
Having condemned the editors of Jyllands-Posten as irresponsible and
cowardly to boot for not showing up for public chastisement, it was now
time for 60 Minutes to turn to the rest of the country. As evidence of
its general xenophobia, Simon pointed to Denmark's strict policies on
immigration, which he called the toughest in Europe and which have
earned
criticism from all the same organizations that habitually find fault
with
America: the U.N., the European Commission on Human Rights, Human
Rights
Watch, etc.
To understand Denmark's current stance on immigration, you need to know
how these policies came about. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Denmark had
an open door policy towards asylum-seekers from the Third World and the
Middle East, Palestinians in particular, often without sufficient
background checks being made. It was naively believed that if you gave
people a nice home, public benefits, access to free hospital care and
free schools, and freedom from persecution, they would turn into nice
Social Democrats.
After two decades of this policy, whose costs in terms of taxes have
been
colossal, the Danes, like the Dutch, the British, and the French,
realized to their horror that integration was not working. Instead,
multiculturalist dogma had led to the development of parallel
societies,
in which people chose to carry on the fights of their countries of
origin, while turning their backs on the country that had let them in.
Thus fundamentalist hate groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, which has called
openly for its members to kill Jews, have been increasingly vocal in
Denmark. The organization is banned in Germany and in Sweden, but so
far
there has been no attempt to shut it down in Denmark.
Trying belatedly to get a handle on the situation, the center-right
government of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, which came into office in 2001,
imposed strict limits on immigration, urged on by its parliamentary
supporters, the Danish People's party, which was the first party in
Denmark to insist that there was an immigration problem. On 60 Minutes,
this party was labeled "ultra right-wing," suggesting strapping fascist
youths roaming the streets in search of defenseless Muslims. For
anybody
even vaguely familiar with Danish politics, this is a ludicrous
caricature. The party consists mainly of middle-aged former Social
Democrats who were disenchanted with that party's refusal to tackle the
issue.
In its handling of immigration issues, it is instructive to compare
Denmark with neighboring Sweden, which faces exactly the same kind of
problems. The difference between the Swedes and the Danes is that the
Swedes have suppressed all debate on immigration, while the Danes
insist
on carrying on an open and frank discussion. The result is that Sweden
has had some really nasty episodes of racist violence, in which people
have gotten killed; Denmark so far has had none.
There are two roads the Danes can take. One is to cave in to
international pressure, loosen up on immigration, and try in general
not
to give offense. This is bound to fail, as it is not within the power
of
the Danes to decide who chooses to be offended. It is the Islamists who
pick these fights. If it had not been the caricatures, it would have
been
something else.
The other is to continue to pursue the course Prime Minister Rasmussen
is
currently on, seeking to establish bonds with moderate Muslims, while
trying to integrate those who are already here rather than adding new
ones. Here it might be a good idea for the Danes to quit worrying
overly
how they are viewed abroad. And indeed, to some Danes, there are worse
things than seeing their flag burned together with the American Stars
and
Stripes. At least they are in excellent company.
To describe a small nation under international pressure would have been
an excellent journalistic undertaking. To do so, though, you have to
know
something of the country you describe. Too bad the 60 Minutes
reporters--
whose quaint liberal fables of ethnic victimization haven't been
updated
since the 1960s--couldn't be bothered.
Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.
http://www.supportdenmark.com
http://www.prophetcartoons.com/
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Tak for det. Skal prøve om jeg kan sprede det lidt.
Thanks for posting. I shall see if I can do my part in spreading this a
little more.
--
>.)
Unter blinden ist der einäugige könig.
http://worldimprover.net/