Flemming Rose has been called a Nazi, a Muslim-hater, and a Danish Satan. He has been simultaneously targeted with death threats and blamed for the deaths of 200 or more innocent people around the world. Since September 2005, when he commissioned now-infamous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed for the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, Rose has been a focal point for the tension between respect for cultural diversity and the protection of democratic freedoms.

This image of Rose as provocateur extraordinaire is difficult to reconcile with the man himself: Soft-spoken and reflective, he gives the impression of being still a little surprised to have caused such a stir. “I am not by nature a provocative person,” he explained to me when I met with him in Washington, D.C. “I do not seek conflict for its own sake, and it gives me no pleasure when people take offense at things I have said or done.” It’s baffling to him that Westerners couldn’t see his decision to publish the cartoons as an act in defense of the values on which liberal democracies were founded.

Rose commissioned the cartoons, including Kurt Westergaard’s incendiary image of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, in order to highlight growing problems of self-censorship in Europe. In London, the Tate Gallery withdrew an installation that featured the Bible, Talmud, and Koran torn to pieces. Museum administrators were wary of offending Muslims, especially in light of the July 2005 bombings. In Denmark, a children’s writer couldn’t find an illustrator for a book about the life of Mohammed; the person who finally agreed to the drawings did so on the condition of anonymity. Meanwhile, the Dutch minister of justice seized on the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh to argue for the necessity of hate speech laws. If the laws had been in place, he insisted, Van Gogh wouldn’t have been murdered—because his film, which critiqued the treatment of women in Islam, would never have seen the light of day in the first place.



Criticizing Islam didn’t constitute a legal offense, but the social pressure to tread softly was immense. The cartoon was a way to insist on freedom of speech and to show the extent to which it was threatened in some of the world’s leading democracies. “Should it not be considered a mark of civilization that in the face of barbaric violence, we respond only with a cartoonist’s pencil?” Rose asks. Still, Muslims around the world erupted in protest; Danish embassies were attacked; a Somali Muslim broke into cartoonist Westergaard’s home wielding an axe and a knife; the newspaper’s offices were evacuated because of bomb scares; and Danmarks Radio, Denmark’s leading public-service media, asked Rose how many bombs had to go off before he apologized.

Rose has spent the years since then speaking at universities and discussion panels, defending his decision, and looking inward. “I found I needed to reflect on my own history and background,” he said. “Why was this debate so important to me?” Rose’s new book, The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, is part of his “personal quest” to make sense of the madness that has engulfed the last decade of his life.