It’s hard to believe that almost eighteen years have passed since the onset of the Danish Mohammed Cartoon Crisis. Kurt Westergaard’s “Turban Bomb” was the iconic image for the affair, but it’s important to remember than twelve cartoons were actually commissioned and published by Jyllands-Posten, and one of the others is shown at the top of this post.

Dymphna and I covered the Motoons — for that was the shortened version of the name that rapidly emerged in the blogosphere — in the early days of this blog. Then, a couple of years later, when I became more closely involved with the European Counterjihad, I was able to make the acquaintance of some of those doughty Danes, and got to know the Scandinavian scene fairly well.

Back then Denmark was refreshingly different. Not only did the Danes tolerate political incorrectness, they even celebrated it on certain occasions. And freedom of speech was vigorously defended, even by government ministers.

That was then; this is now.

The Danish government is planning to reintroduce a blasphemy law so that the burning of Korans can be forbidden. They have been successfully mau-maued by Muslim leaders — including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — who demand that the Danes and the Swedes forbid their citizens to engage in activities that Islam deems offensive.

This is a watershed moment in the history of the West. It marks the beginning of the official transfer of power from the secular humanists to the proponents of sharia. The process will be slow, but inexorable. It will probably take a couple of decades before it is complete. In the end, the tenets of Islamic law will reign supreme in what were formerly known as the Western democracies. Savvy and cynical politicians and bureaucrats will convert to Islam in order to enjoy the privileges and perquisites of the new system. Those who don’t will become second-class citizens.

It will take a while, but we’ll get there in the end.

One of the people I was privileged to meet during my involvement with the European Counterjihad was the redoubtable Mark Steyn, who has been untiring in his struggle against sharia and in support of free speech. His latest essay is a retrospective on the Motoon crisis, and a somber recognition of the emergence of a dhimmi government in Denmark — The Danes, Gelded. Below are some excerpts:

Many years ago, my compatriot Ezra Levant observed that one day the Danish Mohammed cartoons would come to be seen as a more consequential event than 9/11. Not in the overall death toll, obviously — although the corpse count of the Motoons continues to rise (Charlie Hebdo et al) — but in its lessons for a free society’s enemies. 9/11 led to two decades of ineffectual warmongering in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the goatherds with fertilizer soon had the measure of that. But the cartoons and the west’s reaction to them told the world that we would not defend core liberties such as freedom of speech. You don’t need to blow up our skyscrapers; we’re happy to surrender to subtler pressures.

And here we are eighteen years later, with the Danish Government proposing to criminalize the burning of the Koran and make it an offense punishable by fines and/or imprisonment.

So:

~In 2005 Jyllands-Posten, one of the biggest-selling newspapers in Denmark, as part of an exploration of the state of free speech, was willing to publish a dozen cartoons of Mohammed by prominent cartoonists.

~In 2010, on the fifth anniversary, I was given an award by the Danish Free Press Society and appeared on stage with the society’s founder Lars Hedegaard and fellow freespeechers from across the Continent: the Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman, the Dutch cartoonist Nekschot, the Swedish artist Lars Vilks and the Danish-Iranian actor Farshad Kholghi.

If those names don’t ring a lot of bells for you, here’s the scorecard so far:

• Shabana Rehman’s family restaurant was firebombed, and she was forced to live under 24/7 police protection, which is not terribly conducive to a career in observational comedy. She died of cancer last year at the age of forty-six;
• Nekschot was already under so many death threats that he could only appear at public engagements with his face obscured and unidentifiable. So in Copenhagen that day he chose to wear a burqa. Funny, but not quite secure enough. He had already been arrested for “hate speech” with the Dutch authorities openly taunting him about the impending loss of his anonymity. The year after our appearance in Denmark, he gave up cartooning and went into hiding. I assume he is still alive;
• Lars Vilks was speaking at an event on art and blasphemy when a Muslim opened fire with a semi-automatic. A Danish film director was killed and three police officers. The jihad boy then went to a nearby synagogue and killed a second man. Lars retired from public life, and died in 2021 with two of his security detail when their unmarked police car crashed;
• oh, and our host Lars Hedegaard was shot at point blank range, but fortunately by an incompetent. So Lars survived, but his opponent managed to flee to Turkey.

Most of the above did not impinge on the media in a big way: There were no celebrities wearing #JeSuisLars buttons. Nevertheless, of the six who were on stage that day in 2010, there would be only two of us today: me and Farshad Kholghi, last men standing in an Agatha Christie for the jihad set — And Then There Were None. Come to think of it, that might make a blackly comic play, or novel, or film… But good luck finding a publisher or producer.

~In 2015, on the tenth anniversary, I was back in Copenhagen, this time with Douglas Murray:

Like Mark Steyn I’ve been doing these ‘defend free speech’ gigs for some years now and as Mark recently mordantly observed, I also sometimes wonder why I keep ascending up the running order only to realise that it’s because everybody who used to be ahead of me is either in hiding or dead.

As Douglas also remarked:

The event will be in the Danish Parliament apparently because it’s the only place in Denmark sufficiently secure enough that — we hope — the now traditional gunmen won’t be able to get in and shoot everyone.

[…]

As Marie [Krarup] said, the walls of Christiansborg are “thick and massive”. However, I woke up on the morning of the event to find that both the US State Department and the British Foreign Office had issued travel advisories warning their nationals to steer clear of both Copenhagen in general and Christiansborg Palace in particular.

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