Flemming Rose

Flemming Rose (born 11 March 1958) is a Danish journalist, author and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

He previously served as foreign affairs editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

From 1980 to 1996 he was the Moscow correspondent for the newspaper Berlingske Tidende.

Between 1996 and 1999 he was that newspaper's correspondent in Washington, D.C. In 1999 he became Moscow correspondent for Jyllands-Posten and in April 2004 was named its cultural editor, replacing Sven Bedsted.

As culture editor of the same newspaper, he was principally responsible for the September 2005 publication of the cartoons that initiated the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy early the next year, and since then he has been an international advocate of the freedom of speech.

Rose grew up in Copenhagen.

He was one of three children.

His father left the family when Rose was a small boy, and they were out of touch for decades.

After the cartoon crisis, his father wrote him a letter suggesting that they meet and expressing his agreement with Rose's position on the cartoons.

As a result, they met and reconciled.

Rose graduated with a degree in Russian language and literature from University of Copenhagen.

Rose is best known for commissioning a group of drawings of Muhammad that were published in Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005.

His reasoning was that many European creative artists had engaged in self-censorship out of fear of Muslim violence.

The immediate trigger for the commission was the case of the Danish children's book author Kåre Bluitgen, who reportedly couldn't find an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad.

Jyllands-Posten invited Danish illustrators to depict Muhammad "as you see him."

Not all of the cartoons submitted in response to his invitation featured images of Muhammed.

Two of them caricatured Bluitgen, one mocked Jyllands-Posten itself, while others caricatured Danish politicians.

The most famous of the cartoons, by Kurt Westergaard, depicted Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

In February 2006, Rose wrote an essay for the Washington Post entitled "Why I Published Those Cartoons."

He noted that Kurt Westergaard had previously drawn outrageous cartoons of Jesus and the Star of David, neither of which had led to "embassy burnings or death threats".

Rose asked: "Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam?...When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy."

As for avoiding offense, Rose stated: "I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper's ethical code….As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders….The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants."

After the cartoon crisis, Rose traveled around the U.S. and interviewed such figures as Francis Fukuyama, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and Bernard Lewis for the New York Times and Jyllands-Posten.

The interviews later appeared in Rose's book Amerikanske stemmer (American Voices).

Rose has continued to write and be interviewed extensively about the cartoons and the issues raised by the controversy.

He said in a 2007 interview that "publication of the cartoons definitely raised the level of consciousness about self-censorship."

Although some observers have denied that he achieved his goal with the cartoons because there was supposedly "more self-censorship" than before, Rose maintained that what had increased was not self-censorship but awareness of it: "before the cartoon controversy, there were many instances of self-censorship that went unnoticed."

Prior to the publishing of the cartoons, he noted, the Tate gallery in London had removed a torn-up copy of the Koran from an exhibition in order to avoid offending Muslims.

"There was no public reaction to this; there was no talk about self-censorship although it was an obvious case."

After the cartoon case, by contrast, the proposed cancellation for similar reasons of a Berlin production of Idomeneo caused "a tremendous public outcry and outrage."

Rose argued in the interview that "it is discriminatory toward Muslims to say that we should not make fun of their religion when we are making fun of everybody else's religion….I'd like to think that in some sense, the cartoons were an act of inclusion because we were not asking more or less of Muslims but exactly the same as of everybody else. Danish Muslims should be treated as adults, not as a weak minority needing special treatment like small children."

He also expressed surprise "that more European newspapers republished the cartoons than those in the United States."

Unlike the major U.S. dailies, several major European papers reprinted them.

"There are two narratives here: There are those who say that the controversy was about self-censorship—about denying a religious group special treatment in the public domain. That is my narrative. Then, you have another narrative saying: This was not about free speech or self-censorship; it was about a powerful newspaper insulting a minority. This was a fair argument until the moment when the threats were issued. The twelve cartoonists and I received death threats; newspapers were closed in Russia and in Malaysia, and newspaper editors were jailed in Jordan and Yemen. At that point, it became an issue exclusively about free speech."

Europeans, Rose suggested in the interview, do not know how to deal with Islam because of its "strangeness" to them and because of their own "self-hatred stemming from our colonial past and things like that."

Even though Europeans "have been criticizing, challenging, and ridiculing Christianity for decades if not centuries," they "do not do the same with Islam because we have lost our sense of religiosity and are afraid of insulting or being accused of insulting a minority. In my mind, this is not a question of insult but of equal treatment."

He said that people now showed "a lot more understanding of my position than a year ago."

In an October 2007 interview with the American libertarian magazine Reason, Rose stated that "the left is in a deep crisis in Europe because of their lack of willingness to confront the racist ideology of Islamism. They somehow view the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and are willing to ignore everything else, as long of they continue to see the Muslims of Europe as a new proletariat."

Since 2010, he has been the paper's foreign affairs editor.

In November 2015, Rose announced that he was leaving Jyllands-Posten.