Quote:Something’s Rotten in Denmark

The attempted axe-murder of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been widely reported. On January 1, a 28-year-old Somali Muslim hacked his way through the door of Westergaard’s house near Aarhus and when police arrived was attempting to do the same to the reinforced “safe room” where Westergaard had retreated.

Less widely reported is the shameful aftermath, in which Danes have cravenly ostracized the artist.

Westergaard is one of a dozen Danish cartoonists who depicted Mohammed for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, for a feature on self-censorship that later touched off deadly riots around the world and the torching of three Danish embassies in the Middle East. There have been numerous death threats against all the artists. Two Pakistani immigrants, one American and one Canadian, were arrested in Chicago in October and charged with planning an attack on the newspaper.

After his narrow escape, Westergaard donated a watercolor painting to a charity auction hosted by a Danish TV program, with the proceeds to be devoted to earthquake relief in Haiti. But the Lauritz auction house got cold feet and refused to auction his art. “The drawing was in no way controversial, but it seems my name is. I’m sorry for the fear it causes people. When even my hairdresser, who is Muslim, told me with sadness that she didn’t dare keep me on as a customer for fear of reprisals, then there’s reason to be sad about this development,” the 72-year-old artist told reporters in Copenhagen.

The Danish prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, to his credit chastised Lauritz. But defenders of Westergaard are becoming rarer. And there is worse: Karen Thisted, a columnist in the leading tabloid Ekstrabladet, blamed Westergaard for his own troubles. Her January 5 column ran under the headline, “You Are a Coward, Kurt Westergaard.” She accused him of a “constant urge for self-promotion.  .  .  . It has got nothing to do with freedom of speech to keep shouting about oneself and one’s artistic rights, and it irritates me intensely that we Danes have to suffer just because Kurt Westergard can’t get enough of his five minutes of fame.” The column concludes: “You suffer from the compulsive idea that you are personally engaged in a heroic fight on behalf of freedom of speech.”

Seems there are plenty of cowards (and worse, in the case of Thisted) in Denmark, but Westergaard isn’t one of them. A friend of The Scrapbook in Denmark notes that none of the papers there in their coverage of the axe attack dared reprint the cartoon.

On a happier note: Galleri Draupner in Skanderborg stepped up and auctioned Westergaard’s watercolor, raising 100,000 Danish krones ($19,000) for earthquake victims.