A victim is transported to an ambulance after a fatal shooting attack on a free-speech meeting in Denmark. PHOTOGRAPH BY LARS RONBOG/GETTY

Several weeks ago, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff conducted the following interview with Flemming Rose, the foreign editor of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish daily newspaper known for having published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. Rose, who was then the culture editor, made the decision to publish the cartoons, which sparked attacks and violent protests across the Muslim world, and multiple terrorist plots against Jyllands-Posten, Rose, and other staff members.

Rose’s book, “The Tyranny of Silence,” was published late last year in the U.S. Rose and Mankoff spoke about the book and Rose’s views on free speech in person, and continued their conversation via e-mail. This interview is an edited version of their exchanges. Mankoff spoke to Rose today, shortly after a shooting attack on a Copenhagen café. The café was hosting a public event, “Art, Blasphemy, and Freedom of Expression,” featuring the artist Lars Vilks, who has also caricatured Muhammad. One person was killed and three were reported injured. Rose, who said he was not at the event, declined to comment at this time.

More than nine years ago, you commissioned cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and a few months later a global storm erupted. What did you take away from that experience, and would you do it again?

I learned that we are living in a globalized world in which all that is published somewhere immediately is published everywhere. It means that contexts get lost when information travels. It creates enormous space for manipulation and misunderstanding. At the same time, most societies are getting more diverse in terms of culture, ethnicity, and religion, and the consequence is that people with different beliefs and sensibilities have to live side by side. So the question becomes, how do we exercise freedom of speech in this new world?

One way is to say that, if you do not offend my sensibilities, I will refrain from offending yours. That approach sounds nice, and it's popular in many quarters, but if applied in a consistent and democratic way it will lead to a tyranny of silence. In a multicultural and digital world, it's very difficult to say anything that won't be perceived as offensive to somebody either in your own society or in a far-away country.

Another way to go is to ask, what are the minimal limitations on speech in a liberal democracy in order to be able to live together in peace? Very few, I hope. At least, we should get rid of all kinds of "insult" laws that exist in every country except the U.S. It means that people would have to accept that the price we pay for living in a democracy and enjoying its benefits is that we cannot insist on a special right not to be offended. The more diverse a society, the more diverse ways people will express themselves; that's why a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, in order to remain an open society, needs more, not less, freedom of speech.

What's the difference between the European and the U.S. approach to free speech, and do you think they will converge or diverge in the future?

In Europe, we have more legal limitations on speech but less social pressure, while in the U.S. you have very few legal limits but far more social pressure and political correctness.

As a European, I envy the First Amendment, which gives a special status to free speech. In the U.S. constitutional system, the right to freedom of expression cannot be balanced against other rights, even though that doesn't mean that speech isn't regulated. It is. In Europe, freedom of speech doesn't have a special status. It has to be balanced against other rights: the right to dignity, not to be verbally insulted, and so on and so forth. In the U.S., regulation of speech is content-neutral, while in Europe we criminalize certain opinions because they are being perceived to be inciting hatred.

The horror of the Holocaust serves as the founding narrative legitimizing European integration, and it's the key motivation for hate-speech laws on the continent. The European Union has called on all its member states to pass laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. This European narrative is based on a widely accepted interpretation of what led to the Holocaust. It basically says that anti-Semitic hate speech was the decisive trigger, that evil words beget evil deeds, that if only the Weimar government had clamped down on the National Socialists' verbal persecution of the Jews in the years prior to Hitler's rise to power, then the Holocaust would never have happened. I was confronted with this argument during the Danish cartoon crisis, in 2006. People condemned the cartoons as Islamophobic, and warned that the demonization of Muslims might trigger mass violence. "We know what happened in the twenties and thirties," critical voices argued, referring to the seemingly inevitable link between speech and violence.

Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. In the years from 1923 to 1933, Der Stürmer [Streicher's newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. The more charges Streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. The courts became an important platform for Streicher's campaign against the Jews. In the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. As history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.

I have yet to be presented with evidence for the proposition that hate-speech laws are an effective instrument to prevent violence. Seen from Europe, the history of free speech in the U.S. undermines those who insist on a causal link between legalization of hate speech, on the one hand, and racist violence and killings, on the other. Throughout the twentieth century, the U.S. witnessed a gradual relaxation of restrictions on speech; nonetheless, today racism and racial discrimination is less of a problem than it was a hundred years ago.

I fear and hope that the European and U.S. approach to free speech will converge. I fear that the U.S. will move in the direction of Europe, in terms of passing hate-speech laws, which de facto do exist on college campuses around the country. On the other hand, I hope that the U.S. approach and experience will inspire Europe to get rid of hate-speech laws, though right now things are moving in the other direction.