A 28-year-old Somali Islamist allegedly tried to murder the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard with an axe on New Year's night. It was Mr Westergaard who drew the most controversial of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad commissioned by the Arhus-based daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005. His was the one showing a bearded man in a turban shaped like a bomb. Publication of the cartoons led, months later, to riots across the Muslim world. Danish embassies were burned in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. More than 200 people died.
The threats against Mr Westergaard, who is 74, have not abated since. He has had to move house nine times. In October, US authorities arrested two Muslim radicals in Chicago who had allegedly planned to kill him and Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten editor who commissioned the cartoons. The suspects had already travelled to Denmark, allegedly to case the newspaper's offices. Danish authorities have acted to protect Mr Westergaard from other credible death threats. They fitted out his bathroom as a fortified bunker, complete with steel door and a panic-button connection to the local police, a detail that probably saved his life last week. The assailant hacked at the door to no avail as Mr Westergaard's five-year-old granddaughter looked on. Mr Westergaard expects the threats to persist for the rest of his life. That doesn't seem to have dented his forthright disposition. "What will happen in the long run,"� he told a radio interviewer last year, "is that our culture "“ the materialistic, superior culture "“ will of course win out."�
But the constancy of the threats against Mr Westergaard points to a serious challenge to free societies, and shows that we may still underestimate the significance of the Danish cartoon crisis. Mere criminals are not, as a rule, bent on harrying their victims to the grave. The man who attacked Mr Westergaard at New Year also seems to be in it for the long haul. He is a father of three who holds a Danish residence permit and has been in the country for 12 years. But he has been linked by Denmark's intelligence service to both the East African branch of al-Qaeda and the violent Somali youth movement al-Shabaab. The attack on Mr Westergaard was not primarily a crime. It was an act of political violence. The aim, as best we can tell, was not to take Mr Westergaard's money but to enforce "justice"� in a way that would alter society's rules and people's behaviour.
A state's authority rests, as Max Weber said, on a monopoly of violence. In matters of free speech about religion in Denmark, the government monopoly on violence has been broken. There is another player in the market, declaring that cartoons perceived as anti-Islamic are punishable by death. A pattern of political violence against ordinary citizens is something western Europe has not experienced in more than half a century. Some people describe radical Islam as a kind of totalitarianism, or "Islamofascism"�. That is an oversimplification. Even if he had contact with al-Qaeda, Mr Westergaard's would-be assassin was probably working as an individual.
But this power to intimidate, though informal, is potentially decisive. It is the same power exercised by those who threaten journalists in Russia, those who kill policemen in Mexico, or the Ku Klux Klan in the US south of a century ago. Such acts make law. It is remarkable how few people they have to harm to do so. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, was not just mouthing a cliché when he described the attack on Mr Westergaard as "an attack on our open society"�. Once a competing source of predictable violence emerges in an open society, government must do something to stop it.
The concepts of "minority"� and "majority"�, which have for decades provided well-meaning western governments with their main way of understanding justice, are of no help in such a task. Obviously, only a minority of Danish Muslims, and an even smaller minority of Danes as a whole, are violent radical Islamists. But even if that minority is infinitesimal, it is big enough. As long as it can make a credible threat to deal out death to those who disrespect Islam, it can give Islam a privileged status among Denmark's religions.
For all the mayhem and controversy it has occasioned, publication of the Danish cartoons has turned out to be as revealing an exercise as Mr Rose said it would be. Artists talk about "testing the boundaries"� of expression, but they are often fake or obsolete boundaries, things that people wanted passionately to keep hushed up, say, 50 years ago, but don't really care much about now, such as sex.
But Mr Rose hit a real taboo, one backed up by violence. He thus revealed a terrible problem. Political violence is aimed at promoting a cause "“ in this case, special consideration for Islam. If a country cannot stop the violence directly, then the public will demand that it stop the violence indirectly, by thwarting the cause the violence serves. The rise of Geert Wilders's party in the Netherlands, the referendum to ban minarets in Switzerland, the proposed ban on burkas in France "“ these are all desperate measures to declare that Islam is not the first religion of Europe. "This is a war,"� the mainstream French weekly L'Express editorialised in the wake of the attempt on Mr Westergaard's life. "To flee this conflict would be to buy tranquillity today at an exorbitant price in blood tomorrow."� It concluded: "Banning every kind of full-body cover [the burka] in our public spaces is a necessity."� This is not the non-sequitur it appears to be.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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