Flemming Rose

Flemming Rose (born 1958 in Copenhagen) is a Danish journalist, translator and author. He became widely known as culture editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten when, on 19 September 2005, he invited members of the Danish cartoonists' association to draw the prophet Muhammad "as they saw him," and the paper printed twelve drawings on 30 September 2005 with an article by Rose and an editorial by editor-in-chief Carsten Juste. The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy that followed is described in a University of Southern Denmark chronology as Denmark's largest foreign-policy crisis since the Second World War, with boycotts, violent attacks on Danish interests and deaths during demonstrations.

Rose holds a bachelor's degree in Russian studies from the University of Copenhagen and has translated Russian literature. For eight years before 1990 he worked as a translator and Danish teacher at the Danish Refugee Council, then became the first Moscow bureau chief of Berlingske, remaining there from 1990 to 1996 and covering the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was Berlingske's Washington bureau chief from 1997 to 1999 and afterwards Jyllands-Posten's Moscow correspondent, culture editor and foreign editor. A Berlin literature-festival biography dates his appointment as head of the paper's culture section to 2004.

The invitation to the cartoonists followed reports that the author Kåre Bluitgen had had difficulty finding an illustrator for a children's book about Muhammad. In a February 2006 essay in The Washington Post, Rose wrote that he had commissioned the drawings because of what he called incidents of self-censorship in Europe driven by fear and intimidation in dealing with Islam, and that the cartoonists were treating Islam as they treated other religions. He wrote that the newspaper had apologized to people who were offended but would not apologize for the right to publish offensive material. Critics called the drawings childish, irresponsible, hate speech or a provocation, charges Rose listed at the start of that essay. Diplomats from Muslim-majority countries wrote to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen in October 2005 asking for a meeting and that those responsible be held to account. On 4 February 2006 demonstrators set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, and the next day the Danish mission in Beirut was burned and one demonstrator died.

On 8 February 2006 Rose told CNN that Jyllands-Posten would print the winning entry in an Iranian cartoon contest about the Holocaust. Juste said the paper would not publish those cartoons, which he called a tasteless media stunt, and Rose was sent on leave; Rose said on Danish television that he had made an error and stood with the paper's line. In February 2008, after police arrested men suspected of planning to kill the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Rose told Der Spiegel that three men convicted the year before of planning a terrorist act in Denmark had discussed killing him in an early stage of their planning, and that part of the plan was an attack on Jyllands-Posten. He published Tavshedens tyranni (The Tyranny of Silence) in 2010, a book on the controversy that was nominated for Denmark's Cavling Prize; an abridged English edition was published by the Cato Institute in 2014. The Danish Publicist Club awarded him its main prize in 2015, and that year the Norwegian Fritt Ord foundation gave its Freedom of speech tribute jointly to Rose and the Norwegian editor Vebjørn Selbekk. In 2016 the Cato Institute named him recipient of the $250,000 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, and France made him a knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and is editor-in-chief of the Danish outlet Frihedsbrevet.

Early life and education

Childhood and family

Flemming Rose was born on 11 March 1958 in Kastrup, on the island of Amager in the Copenhagen area of Denmark, and he grew up there. He was the eldest of three sons of young parents; his father was a chauffeur and his mother worked in an office. After a few years of marriage his father left, in the early 1960s, to live with another woman. Rose later wrote that he came home from kindergarten to find his father gone from the family's small flat in Kastrup. The father, then 24, had fallen in love with a teenager named Birthe; one Sunday Rose found them in his parents' bed. His father left a wife and three small children, and contact then lapsed.

His mother struggled to find housing she could afford. Rose has said that in one year he lived in six or seven places before he and his oldest younger brother were placed in foster care. The younger brothers also spent time in a children's home. Mother and sons were reunited after Ekstra Bladet journalist Rachel Bæklund campaigned for the family; she housed them for several weeks, and the paper's archive holds photographs of Rose and a younger brother on a staircase. He has called missing his father painful and shameful, but said he tried not to blame him and instead to "take my fate upon myself." After the Muhammad cartoons controversy his father wrote that they had not met for nearly twenty years and asked to meet, saying he shared Rose's position; they met at a café about a month later.

There was little religion at home. Rose remembered no evening prayers or Bible reading, though an older primary-school teacher said the Lord's Prayer with the class, and he was confirmed in 1971 at Tårnby Church. He later called the priest eccentric and the classes remote from his life. Football filled that place: he said he was "socialized through football," and as a teenager he was a striker for Tårnby Boldklub, with teammates who later reached the national team.

In gymnasium, after 1968, he stood apart from classmates for whom Karl Marx was a hero. He admired readers of the left-wing magazine Politisk Revy but preferred the sports pages of Ekstra Bladet and Politiken, and said that, left to himself as a child, he had nothing to rebel against. As football receded he turned to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and meditation, leaving Transcendental Meditation, which he came to see as cult-like, for Acem, a non-religious practice he was still using more than thirty years later.

Russian studies and the Soviet Union

After the studentereksamen, Denmark's upper-secondary examination, Rose studied Russian language and literature. A 2008 profile placed the studies at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Southern Denmark; a later note lists the Copenhagen degree. He has called the choice partly accidental, drawn by DR correspondent Samuel Rachlin's televised interviews from the Soviet Union with chess-playing critics of the system, and by a wish to meet them.

At 22 he went to Moscow to study and soon met Natasja, his Russian-born future wife. By 2010 they had been married nearly thirty years, and they have two daughters. He has dated a year in the Soviet Union to 1980 and 1981 and called it the defining experience of his adult life: the couple shared a communal apartment in central Moscow with three elderly people, and he wrote that daily life there taught him more about the communist system than university had. He read Silver Age poets including Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok, novels by Mikhail Bulgakov and Yuri Trifonov, and films by Andrei Tarkovsky. Three books stood out: Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Oak and the Calf and The Gulag Archipelago.

He has said the gap between welfare Denmark and Soviet life made him a liberal cosmopolitan, rooted in Russian culture from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In early-1980s Moscow he also met liberal critics of the Soviet state.

Journalism before the cartoons

Translation, teaching and early reporting

Before he joined a newspaper, Rose spent eight years at the Danish Refugee Council as a translator and as a teacher of Danish to refugees. A 2016 release from the Cato Institute places that work immediately before his hiring as a correspondent in 1990, and he later told the journalists' magazine Journalisten that it included teaching refugees Danish. The eight years are separate from the academic year he spent in the Soviet Union in 1980–81. In a 2006 essay in Der Spiegel he described those ten months as a student's stay and said he returned only in 1990 as a correspondent.

In the same years he translated Russian books into Danish. A 1989 edition from Gyldendals Bogklubber of Anatoly Rybakov's novel Children of the Arbat (Børn af Arbat) is credited "på dansk ved Flemming Rose." A Schønberg edition of Boris Yeltsin's memoirs, Mod strømmen, also lists Rose as the translator. Rose has written that, by the time he reached Moscow in 1990, the books he had translated included Viktor Astafyev's The Sad Detective as well as the Rybakov novel and the Yeltsin memoirs.

Moscow and Washington

In 1990 Berlingske Tidende hired Rose as its first Moscow bureau chief. He was based there through 1996 and, on Cato's account, covered the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A review in the Copenhagen daily Information on 3 October 1997 identified the same span, 1990–1996, as his time as the paper's Moscow correspondent. Accounts that date a Berlingske Moscow posting to 1980 collapse the student year into the later job; both the 1997 review and the 2016 Cato release put the bureau's start at 1990.

The reporting became a book, Katastrofen der udeblev: Rusland i forvandling 1992–1996 (The Catastrophe That Did Not Happen), issued by Gyldendal on 3 October 1997 at 304 pages. A bookseller's record describes a second printing dated 1998. The Information reviewer treated the book as an eyewitness account built around two themes: private property, which Rose linked to individuals coming to "own their own lives," and the growing political weight of regions in Russia. The review noted travel to Sakhalin, the Amur region on the Chinese border, Yekaterinburg, Tatarstan, and Chechnya, and said the title answered fears, a few years earlier, that Russia would break up as the Soviet Union had. The same critic called Rose by far the best Danish newspaper correspondent of those years, alongside DR's Vibeke Sperling, while faulting what the review called an at times almost propagandistic pro-Yeltsin stance. Writing in Jyllands-Posten the same day, Bent Jensen presented the book as a corrective to a usual media picture of the new Russia as one mass of crime, corruption, poverty, and powerlessness. A later note from the Human Rights Foundation adds that the reporting included conversations with residents and with Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Rose then left Moscow for the United States. Cato states that he was Washington bureau chief for Berlingske Tidende from 1997 to 1999. The Danish library union catalog records a Berlingske article by him dated 31 December 1998, "Men ellers går det godt," on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in Washington, D.C. In 1999 he moved to Jyllands-Posten as its Moscow correspondent and stayed in that post until he came back to Denmark. He has written that the paper approached him because few Danish journalists spoke Russian. His later remark, in Der Spiegel, that he spent eleven years as a correspondent in Russia from 1990 fits the two Moscow postings taken together, not one uninterrupted residence: the Washington years sit between them.

Culture editor at Jyllands-Posten

Rose became culture editor of Jyllands-Posten on 1 April 2004, succeeding Sven Bedsted. DR's later account of his career at the paper gives the same order: Moscow correspondent from 1999, then culture editor five years later. He has written that he and his family settled in Copenhagen in 2004, and in 2007 he told Journalisten that fourteen years as a correspondent had trained him to work on his own.

A 2007 article in Jyllands-Posten quoted the remarks he made on taking the job. He said the paper was "Denmark's international newspaper," and that this should be more visible in the culture section, because the world would press across national borders and readers needed to be prepared for it. He also said the desk would use a wider definition of culture: not only "the beautiful," but habits, ways of thinking, and forms of life, including assumptions he wanted the pages to question.

The Muhammad cartoons

The decision to commission drawings

In Denmark in mid-September 2005, the news agency Ritzau reported that the writer Kåre Bluitgen had struggled to find an illustrator for a children's book on Muhammad, and that the illustrator who accepted insisted on anonymity. Politiken carried the story on 17 September. On 19 September Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Aarhus daily Jyllands-Posten, invited members of the cartoonists' association Danske Bladtegnere to draw Muhammad "as they see him."

The text he printed with the drawings treated that episode as evidence of self-censorship. He cited the comedian Frank Hvam, who had said he dared not mock the Quran on television; translators of essays critical of Islam who wanted anonymity; a museum that had removed a work for fear of Muslim reaction; a theatre season with satires of George W. Bush but none of Osama bin Laden; and an imam who, at a meeting with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, asked the government to press Danish media for more positive coverage of Islam. He wrote that the fear mattered whether or not it was well founded, and that a demand for special regard for religious feelings was incompatible with secular freedom of speech, "where one has to be ready to put up with scorn, mockery and ridicule."

Cartoonists who were asked did not all share that account of why so few replied. The association then listed 44 members, and 12 submitted drawings. In March 2006 the trade paper Journalisten found that 15 of 29 cartoonists it reached had refused because they opposed Jyllands-Posten's idea, not from fear: several called the request a provocation or a campaign, and one recalled a deadline of a couple of days. Six said the letter never arrived. Rose told the magazine that only one cartoonist had cited fear, and that he read the twelve drawings as a statement for free speech; editor-in-chief Carsten Juste still called the thin response self-censorship. His September article had already noted that only about 25 of roughly 40 members were active, and that refusals ranged from argued objections to silence.

Publication on 30 September 2005

The page appeared on Friday 30 September 2005, on page 3 of the KulturWeekend section, under the headline "Muhammeds ansigt" ("The Face of Muhammad"), with Rose's essay in three columns and the drawings around it. An editorial by Juste ran with the package, and one drawing was repeated on the front page beside a note that 12 of about 40 invited illustrators had answered under their own names. The twelve were Arne Sørensen, Poul Erik Poulsen, Rasmus Sand Høyer, Erik Abild Sørensen, Franz Füchsel, Peder Bundgaard, Bob Katzenelson, Annette Carlsen, Lars Refn, Jens Julius Hansen, Claus Seidel and Kurt Westergaard.

They were not one portrait, and several did not show the prophet. The Director of Public Prosecutions later listed a bearded face inside a crescent and star; a turbaned man with a crescent halo; a man leading a donkey; a sweating artist drawing a bearded face; and a schoolboy labeled "Mohammed, Valby School, 7A," pointing at a blackboard. Rose later wrote that the schoolboy's text called the paper's editors "reactionary provocateurs." Westergaard's drawing, the one most often singled out, was a grim bearded man whose turban is an ignited bomb. Elsewhere, a witness at an identity parade that includes Pia Kjærsgaard of the Danish People's Party says he cannot recognize "him"; five headscarved figures stand by the lines "Prophet! You crazy bloke! Keeping women under the yoke!"; two armed men are told it is "just a sketch made by an unbeliever from southern Denmark"; a sword-bearing man with a bar over his eyes stands between two veiled women; a figure on a cloud tells ragged, smoking men, "Stop, stop, we ran out of virgins!"; and a man with an orange in a turban marked "Publicity stunt" holds up a stick-figure drawing.

Immediate reaction in Denmark

The first organized objections came from Danish Muslims. On 2 October the Aarhus imam Raed Hlayhel met with Ahmed Akkari and Ahmad Abu Laban; the group issued a press statement and wrote to the culture minister. On 8 October imams and mosque representatives demanded that the paper withdraw some of the cartoons and apologize officially to Muslims.

On 14 October demonstrators marched in Copenhagen. An Associated Press caption for a photograph of the rally at City Hall Square put the crowd at about 2,000; The Guardian, reviewing the dispute the next February, said 5,000.

On 12 October, ambassadors and representatives of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Libya and Morocco, with the head of the Palestinian delegation, wrote to Fogh Rasmussen. They called the cartoons part of an "on-going smearing campaign," said depictions of Muhammad contradicted Danish tolerance, and asked the government to "take all those responsible to task under law of the land" and to meet them. His reply of 21 October said Danish society rested on freedom of expression, religious tolerance and equal treatment of religions; that the government could not influence the press; and that blasphemous or discriminatory expressions were a matter for the courts. He did not agree to the meeting.

On 27 October eleven Muslim associations complained under section 140 of the Criminal Code, on public mockery or scorn of a religious community's doctrines or worship, and section 266b, on threatening, scorning or degrading a group because of its religion. The report went to the Aarhus police. The Regional Public Prosecutor in Viborg discontinued the investigation on 6 January 2006; Director of Public Prosecutions Henning Fode upheld that decision on 15 March. Fode held that a drawing of Muhammad was not in itself a crime, because Islamic practice does not impose one absolute ban, and that several cartoons were neutral or were not mockery of doctrine. The bomb-turban image could be read as criticism of religious violence or as an insulting picture of the prophet, but not, he wrote, with the certainty the statute required as mockery or scorn, nor as a claim that Muslims in general were terrorists. He added that Danish law does limit religious speech, and that the paper's formula about bearing "scorn, mockery and ridicule" was "not a correct description of existing law."

The international crisis

Diplomatic protests and boycotts

Foreign governments entered the dispute within weeks. On 20 October 2005 the BBC reported that ambassadors from 10 Muslim-majority countries, among them Pakistan, Iran, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Indonesia and several Arab states, had written to Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen objecting that the Jyllands-Posten cartoons showed Muhammad as a stereotypical fundamentalist. Rasmussen later said the letter came from 11 ambassadors who had asked for a meeting and for government action, and that he had answered by urging tolerance while stating that the government could not interfere with the press or take legal steps against the paper. He refused to meet them then.

Danish imams took the images abroad. The Guardian reported a trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier; the BBC later described travel to Egypt and Lebanon. Ahmed Abu Laban told the Guardian the file held the 12 published cartoons and three further images—among them Muhammad as a paedophile and a picture from a French pig-squealing contest—which he called hate mail to Muslims in Denmark. The paper said those additions were not its own.

Late January 2006 brought recalls and a boycott. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador on 26 January. On 29 January Libya said it was closing its embassy in Copenhagen because Denmark had not acted against what it called disrespect to Muhammad, and that it would take unspecified economic steps. Syria recalled its senior diplomat, and the Arab League called for those responsible to be punished. Arla Foods, with about $480 million in annual Middle Eastern sales, told the BBC on 31 January that sales had stopped within five days and that it was laying off 100 people. By October, Danish Industry estimated food exports to Muslim-majority countries down 35 percent, against a rise of about 10 percent for other European exporters.

On 31 January Jyllands-Posten said the cartoons had not broken Danish law but had offended many Muslims, "and for that we apologise." Rasmussen welcomed the apology. Meeting ambassadors on 3 February, he said he was deeply distressed at what many Muslims took as a defamation of Muhammad and that Denmark respected Islam, but that "a Danish government can never apologise on behalf of a free and independent newspaper."

Violence, deaths and reprints

Reprints outside Denmark, defended as freedom of speech, were followed within days by attacks on diplomatic buildings.

The Norwegian magazine Magazinet reprinted some images on 10 January. On 1 February France-Soir, Die Welt and papers in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland published cartoons from the Danish set. France-Soir's front page read "Yes, we have the right to caricature God." Owner Raymond Lakah then dismissed managing editor Jacques Lefranc, calling it a sign of respect for belief, and the paper apologised; the French foreign ministry said expression did not justify hurting religious convictions. Die Welt's Roger Köppel called a refusal to print "appeasement."

On 4 February demonstrators in Damascus set fire to the Danish embassy and then the Norwegian embassy. No diplomats were reported injured. Denmark and Norway accused Syria of failing to protect the missions. The next day protesters in Beirut burned the Danish embassy building; at least 18 people were injured, a nearby church was attacked, and Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh resigned.

Counts of the dead differ. A BBC chronology, written as it reported killings in northern Nigeria, listed 12 deaths in Afghanistan from 6 to 12 February, five in Pakistan from 13 to 18 February, 10 in Libya on 17 February and 16 in northern Nigeria on 18 February. The Libyan deaths came when protesters burned the Italian consulate in Benghazi after an Italian minister wore a shirt printed with the cartoons. In Maiduguri a Christian leader said most of those killed were Christians and that churches had been burned. A Guardian article a year later said "at least 139" had been killed, without a country breakdown. Denmark closed missions in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia and Pakistan for a time.

Rose's defense and leave of absence

Rose split with his editors over a different set of drawings, then published a longer defense. On 8 February he told CNN that Jyllands-Posten was contacting the Iranian newspaper Hamshari, which planned cartoons about the Holocaust, and would run them the same day. Editor-in-chief Carsten Juste refused. The paper said Rose had been over-interpreted and that it would "under no circumstances" publish the Iranian cartoons, and it repeated, in a letter sent via Algiers, its regret for offending Muslims. On 10 February a spokesman said the editors and Rose had agreed he "needed a break from work until further notice."

In "Why I Published Those Cartoons," which The Washington Post carried online on 17 February, Rose wrote that the project was not meant as gratuitous provocation or to start violent demonstrations. He cited a comedian willing to mock the Bible on camera but not the Quran, and a children's writer who could not find a named illustrator. He said he had asked cartoonists to "draw Muhammad as you see him," not to ridicule the prophet, and that 12 of 25 replied; the point, he argued, was to treat Islam as Danish satire treated other religions. Of the bomb-in-the-turban image, he wrote that he read it as a comment on terrorism in Muhammad's name, not a claim that the prophet or every Muslim was a terrorist, and he noted that the paper would still refuse pornography or graphic images of the dead.

Threats, plots and protection

Death threats and Danish cases

The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons brought death threats against the people who produced them. Kurt Westergaard, whose drawing for Jyllands-Posten showed Muhammad with a bomb in place of a turban, received repeated threats, went into hiding, and later lived in a fortified house in Aarhus.

Rose was discussed as a possible target in a Danish terrorism case. In February 2008 he told Der Spiegel that three men convicted the year before of planning an attack in Denmark had, at an early stage, also talked about killing him and attacking the newspaper. That day the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) arrested two Tunisians and a Danish citizen of Moroccan origin near Aarhus "to prevent a murder linked to terrorism," after lengthy surveillance. PET did not name the intended victim; the paper identified Westergaard, already under police protection. The Danish suspect was to be released pending investigation, and the Tunisians held for expulsion.

Plots aimed at the newspaper and cartoonists

On 1 January 2010 Mohamed Geele, a Somali man, broke into Westergaard's Aarhus house with an axe and a knife while the cartoonist was there with his five-year-old granddaughter. Westergaard shut himself in a reinforced bathroom; he told the court Geele shouted "You must die!" and "You are going to Hell!" and hacked at the door, until police shot and wounded Geele.

In February 2011 an Aarhus court convicted Geele of attempted murder and terrorism, finding the attack was meant to frighten the population, and sentenced him to nine years. He was acquitted of trying to murder an officer but convicted of aggravated assault; Danish intelligence said he had links to al-Shabaab. An appeals court later increased the term to 10 years.

A separate plot was organized from Pakistan and Chicago. David Coleman Headley testified that in November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba told him to prepare an attack on Jyllands-Posten over the cartoons, that he visited the Copenhagen offices in 2009, and that a militant tied to al-Qaeda then wanted a "stronghold" raid in which hostages would be killed and beheaded. The New York Times reported that he had proposed killing the cartoonist and the cultural editor rather than only striking the building. Arrested in October 2009, he pleaded guilty; the attack was not carried out. In January 2013 a U.S. judge sentenced him to 35 years for the Denmark conspiracy and the Mumbai attacks. Co-defendant Tahawwur Hussain Rana received 14 years for supporting that plot and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

In September 2010 a bomb exploded in a Copenhagen hotel toilet and injured Lors Dukayev, a Chechen-born resident of Belgium. Police said the device, made with TATP and ball bearings, would have had the force of a hand grenade, and that they were reasonably confident Jyllands-Posten was the target; a court later sentenced him to 12 years.

On 29 December 2010 police arrested Munir Awad, Omar Abdallah Aboelazm and Munir Ben Mohamed Dhahri near Copenhagen; Sabhi Ben Mohamed Zalouti was caught the next day crossing into Sweden. Danish and Swedish intelligence had tracked the four. In June 2012 a Glostrup court gave each 12 years for planning an attack on the newspaper's offices in revenge for the cartoons, intended, prosecutors said, to kill an unknown number of people and frighten the population. Officers found a silenced machine gun, a pistol, 108 bullets and duct tape, and police said the arrests came hours before the attack.

In 2013 an al-Qaeda publication named Westergaard and Swedish artist Lars Vilks on a "most wanted" list. The Atlantic reported that a later version still included Rose beside the crossed-out name of Charlie Hebdo editor Stéphane Charbonnier.

Security and daily life

Westergaard used the reinforced room in the 2010 attack, later lived with a bodyguard at undisclosed addresses, and in 2015 was still reported to be under police protection.

The January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo killed 12 people in the attack on the magazine, which had published cartoons of Muhammad, including cartoonists the gunmen asked for by name, the editor, and his police bodyguard. The next month, in the 2015 Copenhagen shootings, a gunman fired on a free-speech meeting attended by Vilks, who was not hit, killing filmmaker Finn Nørgaard and wounding police. He then killed Dan Uzan, on security duty outside a synagogue, and was shot dead by police. Danish intelligence said it was examining whether he had been inspired by the Paris attacks, and Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the shootings a cynical act of terror by forces that wanted to "rebuke our freedom of speech."

By December 2015 Rose, interviewed in Copenhagen, was accompanied by three armed bodyguards, in an account that linked the guard to an al-Qaeda list renewed after the Paris killings.

Books and the free-speech argument

The Tyranny of Silence

Tavshedens tyranni, published on 30 September 2010 by Jyllands-Postens Forlag, is Flemming Rose’s 528-page account of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy and a defense of publishing what he considers important. An abridged English edition, The Tyranny of Silence, came from the Cato Institute in 2014 (240 pages); The Economist included it among that year’s books. Rose grounds the case in his years as a Berlingske correspondent in Russia and, in the English edition, gives a personal account of the controversy that includes meetings with dissidents from the former Soviet Union and with ex-Muslims living in Europe. Erik Bjerager wrote that Rose treats the naming of criticism as insult as a totalitarian device, shaped by self-censorship in the Soviet Union and by dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Invoking Salman Rushdie, Rose writes that no one may dictate another person’s story: once storytelling can be limited, the only dispute left is how much unfreedom to accept. On page 438 he allows that critics who said he and Jyllands-Posten ignored the offense to millions of Muslims “perhaps have a point,” then asks whether religious feelings should outrank the right to offend them. Lasse Ellegaard, writing from Lebanon, argued that silence can be humane where words kill; Bjerager called the book excellent and still doubted that the drawings had to be printed.

Later books

Katastrofen der udeblev (The Catastrophe That Did Not Happen), 305 pages from Gyldendal, appeared on 3 October 1997. Information called it an unusually successful book on Russia from 1992 to 1996, built around private property and regions out to Chechnya. The title named a fear that Russia would break up as the Soviet state had; the reviewer accepted that frame and faulted a sometimes “propagandistic” sympathy for Boris Yeltsin that softened poverty, oligarchs, and the Chechen war.

Hymne til friheden (JP/Politikens Forlag, 28 September 2015) marks the cartoons’ tenth anniversary and turns on conversations Rose held in Paris after the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Anita Brask Rasmussen found it more open than Tavshedens tyranni: Rose treats speech as a right that cannot be graded, while the surviving satirists defended laws against Holocaust denial and separated mockery of people from mockery of symbols. She also noted his disagreements with them and with Geert Wilders, and his refusal to be claimed by a campaign against Muslims. De besatte (Peoples Press, 29 October 2016, 352 pages), titled after Fyodor Dostoevsky, narrates the fight inside JP/Politikens Hus until Rose’s resignation in September 2015. After plots uncovered in 2010–2011, chairman Jørgen Ejbøl imposed a charter on Rose’s journalism, lectures, and broadcasting; chief executive Lars Munch is quoted saying, “You seem possessed.” Rose writes that the drawings were proposed by a secretary in Viby and assigned by editor Jørn Mikkelsen, and that he more than embraced them, as Kurt Westergaard and the company became targets and Politiken’s editor criticized Jyllands-Posten. Jensen called it necessary and overlong, a choice of lives against principles; management said the limits protected colleagues. In January 2017 Weekendavisen readers gave it the Weekendavisen Book Award, 100,000 kroner.

Arguments on law, offense and self-censorship

In the 2010 book, and in a 2012 Index on Censorship extract, Rose rejects what he calls a false lesson of the Holocaust: that words kill, and that suppressing National Socialist speech in the Weimar Republic would have prevented genocide. He grants that Nazi propaganda mobilized antisemitism, but writes that a ban would not have stopped the Holocaust and that speech in Germany was not unrestricted in those years. Bjerager reported the sharper claim that Weimar bans on insult fed the genocide—Rose cited 36 cases against Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer from 1923 to 1933—and called it counterfactual history pushed too far. Bjerager also recorded Rose’s proposal to repeal Danish bans on racist speech and blasphemy so debate would match the latitude he associated with the United States. Rose argues that Article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination collapse words into acts, tools he says “grievance fundamentalists” and authoritarian governments exploit. Brask Rasmussen, citing his use of Timothy Snyder, answered that the Holocaust is not explained by antisemitic speech alone, nor without such speech having been treated as legitimate.

On offense, Rose asks whether protecting religious feelings matters more than the right to offend them, and answers with thicker skin rather than more bans. In Hymne til friheden he writes that free speech trusts people to handle what they find offensive, and that restricting it expresses distrust of their reason, a view the Charlie Hebdo journalists in the book reject. Self-censorship links the volumes: Bjerager traced the 2005 text to Rose’s account of Soviet fear, and De besatte describes a company charter on the cartoons and Islam that reviewers called one-sided and management justified as staff protection. In a 2015 review for the Institute of Race Relations, Peter Hervik called the English book a participant’s source rather than an analysis, faulted its empathy, and wrote that Rose sets Islam beside Soviet communism and Nazism and that, for many Muslims, Westergaard’s bomb-in-the-turban drawing had come to weigh like a swastika. Peter Suedfeld instead credited the account of Muslim disagreement over images of Muhammad and of a Western double standard that defended anti-Christian and antisemitic work.

Reception and criticism

Charges of provocation and double standards

In December 2005 Jyllands-Posten editor-in-chief Carsten Juste said Politiken editor Tøger Seidenfaden had alleged on national radio that the paper's drawings of Muhammad were meant to provoke for their own sake and to "test where Muslims draw the line." Juste answered that Seidenfaden had not been in the meetings, that insulting Muslim faith was never the aim, and that a cruder drawing—he cited Muhammad urinating on the Quran—would have been rejected, as cartoons offensive to Christians had been. On the fifth anniversary Seidenfaden called the publication unsympathetic and unintelligent, and said dialogue with Muslims had become harder because the drawings were perceived as bullying.

In April 2003 illustrator Christoffer Zieler had sent unsolicited cartoons of the resurrection of Jesus. Sunday editor Jens Kaiser wrote that readers would not enjoy them and that they would "provoke an outcry," so he would not use them. Kaiser later called the comparison ridiculous: the Muhammad drawings were commissioned, while Zieler's were unsolicited and, he thought, not funny. Ahmed Akkari, spokesman for the European Committee for Prophet Honouring, representing 27 Muslim organizations that wanted an apology, asked how the paper could distinguish the cases. Outside Denmark, Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain said most of Europe would not mock the Holocaust, "and rightly so," and asked why this case was different.

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the government could not apologize for a newspaper and that he personally would not have depicted Muhammad, Jesus or any other religious figure offensively. Juste wrote that the cartoons "were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims, for which we apologise." The European Union urged a voluntary media code against further inflaming religious feeling, and after Rose suggested also running Iranian cartoons about the Holocaust, Juste disagreed and Rose took an agreed break from work.

Support among editors and writers

On 1 February 2006, papers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain reprinted some of the drawings in support of the Danish paper. Reporters Without Borders called press freedom an "essential accomplishment of democracy" and said Arab reaction showed a lack of understanding of it. France-Soir said religious dogma had no place in a secular society; its owner then dismissed managing editor Jacques Lefranc "as a powerful sign of respect" and regretted the shock to Muslims. Dalil Boubakeur, of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, called the printing a "real provocation." Die Welt argued for a right to blaspheme and asked whether Islam could cope with satire. Editor Roger Köppel said the point was self-censorship, not annoyance, and that "evenhandedness cannot be a goal" because a majority culture sets the rules. Mohammad Aman Hobohm, of Germany's central council of Muslims, said the reprints were meant "to spite the Muslims," not to defend freedom of speech.

On 1 March 2006 Charlie Hebdo ran a statement signed by twelve writers, including Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It called Islamism a "new global totalitarian threat" after fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, and said events "prompted by the publication of drawings of Muhammad" showed a struggle of democrats against theocrats, not a clash of civilizations. The signatories refused to drop criticism of a religion for fear of the charge of "Islamophobia." In Berlin on 9 February 2006, Hirsi Ali said publication and republication had been right, because self-censorship had "far-reaching consequences for democracy." She criticized editors who invoked "responsibility" and "sensitivity," praised Rasmussen for refusing demands she attributed to tyrannical regimes, and said a rule against drawing Muhammad was "a demand for submission."

Journalistic and scholarly assessments

Juste said a reporter had proposed asking illustrators to draw Muhammad after none would openly illustrate Kåre Bluitgen's children's book. Of about 40 asked, 12 agreed, three of them staff cartoonists he thought might have felt obliged, and some drawings did not show Muhammad. He called the return "a little thin," said it gave "no clear answer" on self-censorship, and recalled serious doubts, including strong advice against publication from journalists who covered Muslims. He still called the cartoons ordinary Danish caricature and the inquiry legitimate. Ten years later he wrote that the project had "achieved the exact opposite"—more self-censorship than ever—while saying he could not have faced himself had he refused to print, and that a fuller apology would have been used against the paper.

In The Cartoons That Shook the World, Brandeis University political scientist Jytte Klausen argued that the protests were organized, by actors in Denmark and Egypt with electoral aims and by others seeking to destabilize governments elsewhere, and that the cartoons were a pretext. Yale University Press published the book in 2009 without the 12 cartoons and without other images of Muhammad, including a children's-book drawing, an Ottoman print and a Gustave Doré plate for Dante's Inferno. Director John Donatich called the consultants' advice "overwhelming and unanimous" and said he would not have "blood on my hands." Yale said the ground was risk of violence, not offense, and noted that it had published images of Muhammad before. Klausen accepted the cartoons' removal "with sadness," objected to losing the older images, refused what she called a gag order on the consultants' report, and said she had not wanted another demonstration for or against the drawings. Reza Aslan withdrew a blurb and called the cut "idiotic" and "academic cowardice." Cary Nelson, then president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote that Yale "doesn't negotiate with terrorists" and "just accedes to their anticipated demands," a line he later said was meant to frame the case as academic freedom rather than as liberal reluctance to give offense.

Awards and later career

Prizes and honors

In 2007, while culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, Rose received two Danish honors for the cartoons. The Free Press Society (Trykkefrihedsselskabet) made him the first winner of its Sappho Prize, for skill joined to courage and a refusal to compromise. Chairman Lars Hedegaard cited his printing of drawings of Muhammad and his standing “his ground under the worst storm any journalist has ever endured.” Hege Storhaug presented the prize—20,000 kroner and a sculpture of Sappho—on 27 March in Copenhagen. On 28 August the paper’s foundation gave him the Laust Jensen Prize, 50,000 kroner and a statuette, for handling the crisis and the debate that followed. Responsible editor Carsten Juste said that “with great personal courage” Rose had kept the crisis’s “real content and perspective” in view.

In 2015 the Danish Publicists’ Club gave him Den Store Publicistpris, its award for a long record of quality journalism, at a ceremony in Copenhagen on 19 March, with 20,000 kroner from the Spar Nord Foundation. The jury called him “a strong and central actor in the international debate on freedom of speech” who had “stood by his principles” while “explaining and nuancing his views.” On 22 September the Norwegian foundation Fritt Ord, in Oslo, gave Rose and the editor Vebjørn Selbekk its Freedom of Expression Tribute, 100,000 Norwegian kroner each. Announced on 31 August, near the tenth anniversary of the 30 September 2005 publication, the award called them “the very symbols” of the caricature controversy and said they had defended freedom of expression at a “very high personal price.”

On 11 May 2016 the Cato Institute named him winner of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, $250,000, named for the economist Milton Friedman. Cato said the 2005 commission of twelve cartoons had been meant to expose self-censorship and intimidation, that he had refused to apologize, and that The Tyranny of Silence continued the case; chief executive Peter Goettler cited “great courage in his passionate defense for free speech.” Nadine Strossen presented it on 25 May at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. On 20 July in Paris, Jacques Toubon, a former culture minister then serving as France’s rights ombudsman, made him a knight of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for that campaign, calling the episode a revelation of “the daily struggle for freedom of expression.” Rose pointed to Charlie Hebdo’s republication. On 26 January 2017 Weekendavisen’s readers gave De besatte the paper’s 2016 literature prize, 100,000 kroner. Søren Villemoes’s citation called it a reward for “an inspiring and admirable intellectual achievement,” not “free-speech fundamentalism,” and an account of what fear of terrorism does to a news organization.

Cato Institute and Frihedsbrevet

In November 2015 Rose said that, after sixteen years at Jyllands-Posten—Moscow correspondent from 1999, culture editor from 2004, and foreign editor from 2010—he was leaving the foreign desk to write and debate more. He said growing diversity in Europe was putting freedom under pressure. At the Friedman dinner, Goettler announced a full-time senior fellowship, based in Copenhagen, on freedom in Europe. Rose said he would write about speech and about civil liberties in the refugee crisis, with the Washington, D.C., institute behind him. Cato had published the English Tyranny of Silence in 2014.

In Cato’s Free Society in October 2025, Rose said he had “worked for Cato for four years.” The introduction still called him a senior fellow “who is now the editor in chief” of Frihedsbrevet. That outlet went online on 5 June 2021 with Rose as an editor-in-chief beside the filmmaker Mads Brügger, the responsible editor-in-chief; Kristoffer Eriksen was to join in December. Rose said the job was full time, though not based in the newsroom daily, and that his newsletter Fri Tænkning would be interviews. He said that, unlike an earlier newsroom, this one left him his “full freedom.” Its staff page listed him as editor-in-chief (chefredaktør) under Brügger.