People hold pencils at the French Embassy in Copenhagen the day after the Charle Hebdo attack in January 2015 | Niels Ahlmann Olesen/AFP/Getty Images fourth estatte Cartoons and the ‘jihadi veto’ Ten years after the Jyllands-Posten controversy, Denmark still grapples with free speech.

COPENHAGEN -- September 30, 2015, marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten, a decision that would ignite a global battle of values over the relationship between free speech and religion that is still ongoing.

On one side of this conflict are those who insist that free speech includes the right to offend any idea, religious or secular, and that tolerance means putting up with those expressions that you most despise. On the other side are those who believe that religion, and in particular Islam, must be protected from scorn and mockery, a small minority of whom are willing to use violence to enforce a “jihadist’s veto.” In between are the many members of what Salman Rushdie has called the “but-brigade,” people who are formally committed to free speech, but for whom a commitment to tolerance and social peace means imposing society-wide norms of self-censorship on ideas that may offend or hurt members of religious or ethnic groups.

In a world where, according to Freedom House, only 14 percent of the population live in states with free speech, and where respect for press freedom is at its lowest point in more than 10 years, the stakes of this battle are very high indeed. Will the hard won freedoms of conscience and expression prevail, or will even liberal democracies internalize a sugar-coated version of the red lines of the “jihadist veto?”

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To gauge which side is winning, it might be useful to zoom in on the developments at Ground Zero of this conflict, the state of Denmark. When the cartoon crisis exploded in early 2006, some months after the original publication, Flemming Rose, the editor responsible for the publication (and an oft forgotten but quite prophetic accompanying article), was viewed as something of a pariah. Rose was widely shamed as an Islamophobe, a thoughtless and primitive bigot with a complete lack of understanding of the norms of a globalized world where images published in Copenhagen are instantly available in Cairo and Karachi.

One of Rose’s fiercest critics was former Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs Uffe Ellemann-Jensen who repeatedly criticized the publication of the cartoons, insisting that Jyllands-Posten had decoupled free speech and tolerance and thereby committed “a provocation that intentionally and completely gratuitously trampled on many people’s feelings.”

In March 2006, the Danish Association of Publishers awarded Ellemann-Jensen its prestigious prize for his “courageous statements in the Cartoon affair” adding “but don’t tell us that he is a less noble defender of free speech than those who abuse it” -- the abusers being Rose and Jyllands-Posten. Since those statements, at least five serious terrorist attempts against Jyllands-Posten and some of the main protagonists of the cartoon crisis have been thwarted, including a plot masterminded by American-Pakistani terrorist David Headley that included plans to behead as many Jyllands-Posten journalists as possible and throw their heads on to the street below. These events, and the subsequent attack against Charlie Hebdo, which reprinted the Danish cartoons in 2006, have had an effect on intellectuals and public opinion.

In 2015, the publishers' association this time awarded its prize to none other than Flemming Rose, who was now characterized “as a strong and central actor in the international debate on free speech,” defending a “principled” and “nuanced” stand. Change had set in not only among the cultural elite. In 2006, 43 percent of the Danish population supported Jyllands-Posten’s decision to publish the cartoons, with 49 percent opposed. In January 2015, shortly after the attack against Charlie Hebdo, the ranks of the supporters had swollen to 65 percent, with only 17 percent opposed. For a month or so we were all Charlie, and several of Jyllands-Posten’s former detractors now acknowledged that in fact there was a threat against free speech from radical Islamists.

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Things changed again the following month. A free speech debate and a synagogue in Copenhagen were attacked by an Islamist gunman on February 14 this year, resulting in two fatalities, and fear crept in. While the Charlie Hebdo affair put the but-brigade on the defensive, the events on February 14 in Copenhagen gave it new life.

The publicly funded Danish Broadcasting Corporation imposed a rule on its journalists insisting that the cartoons could not be shown on TV without prior authorization from senior management. When a journalist ignored this instruction by showing the cartoons on live TV in an interview with Flemming Rose, he was reprimanded by his editor. Lars Refn, chairman of the Danish Association of Cartoonists, told a newspaper that no media would ever be allowed to republish the cartoons again, since it would amount to “a terrorist attack against all Muslims in the world.” That’s 1.6 billion people.

In September 2015 the chairman of Danish school leaders told a newspaper that the cartoons should not be included in school books, even when the cartoon crisis was part of the school curriculum, since it might “provoke” Muslim children. He did not explain why it was more important to protect the religious feelings of Muslim children than, say, the feelings of Jewish children confronted with pictures of swastikas or the Holocaust in history books on World War II; or why no ban exists on black school children being confronted with pictures from the dark days of slavery.

Despite the 10-year anniversary of the event, which set off the biggest political crisis in Denmark since World War II, no Danish newspaper republished the cartoons. Jyllands-Posten has an official policy of not doing so which it admits is because “violence works.” Other newspapers claim that republishing the cartoons is not “relevant,” or that there is no need to do so, since “everybody knows what they look like.” Of course most of us also know what the Queen looks like, yet when she celebrated her 75th birthday in April her picture was everywhere to be seen on print and TV.

Outside Denmark the sugar coating of the “jihadist’s veto” has also taken hold. On October 1, PBS’s Newshour aired a piece on the anniversary of the cartoons (in which both Flemming Rose and I appeared). In an “editor’s note” the news anchor explained that PBS has a “policy of not showing images of the prophet Muhammad,” since they are “offensive” to some viewers. Yet when in June PBS covered the fallout from Donald Trump’s derogatory comments on Mexicans, Newshour had no qualms about quoting verbatim from Trump’s comments, although they were clearly offensive to many Mexicans.

Just how absurd the consequences of adopting “offense” as a criterion for documenting news stories really is becomes clear when listening to one of the people interviewed in the Newshour piece. Imran Shah is the spokesperson of the Islamic Society of Denmark and in the interview insists that one should not “force people” to be “humiliated” and “dishonored.” Yet on several occasions the ISD have hosted Islamic scholars such as Haitham Al-Haddad, who has called for the stoning of women and called homosexuality “a crime” and “a scourge.” So while Imran Shah is happy to use freedom of expression and religion to spread ideas deeply offensive toward women and gays, he wants a “but” inserted when it comes to Islam, and news media -- from Denmark to the US -- have complied.

There can be little doubt that the past 10 years have proven Flemming Rose right when on September 30, 2005, he wrote that “the public debate is being intimidated,” and warned that “we’re on a slippery slope, where no one can predict what the result of self-censorship will be.” Fortunately, the prescience of Rose’s prophecy has had a salutary effect on public opinion. But whether it will be enough to conquer the fear that has paralyzed editors and newsrooms is yet to be seen.

Jacob Mchangama is the executive director of Justitia, a Copenhagen-based think tank focusing on human rights and the rule of law. He has taught international human rights law at the University of Copenhagen and written on human rights in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal Europe and The Times. He tweets at @jmchangama.