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Flemming Rose is a Danish journalist. He is the current cultural editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and an author. He was responsible for the first publication of the cartoons in the Muhammed cartoons crisis. He is currently on indefinite leave from his newspaper, after a controversial offer to reprint Iranian cartoons of the Holocaust.

Life

49-year-old Rose was born on 14 March 1956 and has a major in Russian language and literature from University of Copenhagen. From 1990 to 1996 he was the Moscow correspondent for the newspaper Berlingske Tidende. Between 1996 and 1999 he was the correspondent for the same newspaper in Washington, D.C.. In 1999 he became Moscow correspondent for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten and January 2005 the cultural editor of that paper (KulturWeekend).

He has an active interest in meditation and practices it regularly. "In my work, I travel a lot. It is not always easy to keep in touch with my own emotional roots. Daily meditations help me regain contact." He has been on the journalistic team accompanying Bill Clinton to China. "Recently I travelled with Bill Clinton to China for nine days. I had to write eight articles during seven days without even having been to China before. I really had to work efficiently and try not to be too influenced by my own prejudices regarding China and the Chinese. Needless to say, meditation was a good travel companion."

He attempts to avoid succumbing to stereotypes. "I try to describe an event free from stereotypical assumptions. For instance, Americans are not just shallow and materialistic, and Russians are not only lazy people who do not understand democracy."

Cartoon crisis

Rose is best known outside of Denmark for commissioning the drawings of Muhammad in the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon crisis on 30 September 2005.

Cultural and political philosophy

Rose commissioned the controversial cartoons since he felt there were too many examples of self-censorship because of threats from Muslims. Inspired partly by the well known American conservative thinker Daniel Pipes, Rose has long had concerns about the impact of incompatible world views on Western liberal society. He was especially concerned about the threat to freedom, self expression and Western civilisation and culture from Islam's world-view. He has written an excellent article that was printed in the Jyllands-Posten on October 29, 2004 on these issues .

As he writes, quoting Pipes, "In this third confrontation, militant Islam is the challenge. The core of militant Islamic ideology is hidden in the expression "al-Islam huwwa al-hall", which means: Islam is the solution."

And as he says, "Pipes undrer sig over, at der ikke er større alarm i Europa over den udfordring, islam repræsenterer takket være faldende fødselsrater og en svækket fornemmelse for egen historie og kultur." (Pipes is amazed that Europe is not more alarmed about the challenge that Islam poses, considering plummeting birth rates and a weakened perception of its own history and culture.)

Rose's Responses

Rose said that if Muslims demand "that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos ... they're asking for my submission."

When asked whether he had any regrets about commisioning the cartoons, he said, "That is a hypothetical question. I would say that I do not regret having commissioned those cartoons and I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt Friday night at the discotheque."

He defends himself strongly, saying,"When I go to a mosque, I behave by the rules that exist in that holy house. I will not stand up and make a cartoon of the holy prophet in a mosque. But I think if any religion insists that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos, then I don't think they're showing me respect. I think they're asking for my submission. This is a key issue in this debate."

Rose states that there is a culture war between Islam and the west and between forward thinking and backward factions in Islam "This is a culture war and it's not only a culture war between Western democracies and the Islamic world," Rose says. "I see this first and foremost as a culture war within the Muslim world, between those Muslims who want to live in a modern, secular democracy and the forces who want to turn back the clock and have all the same totalitarian and authoritarian impulses that I saw in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe when I was living there in the 80s and 90s."

Holocaust Cartoons

In interviews with CNN and TV 2 Rose said on 8 February 2006 that Jyllands-Posten would reprint cartoons of the Holocaust from the competition run by the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri. He told CNN "My newspaper is trying to establish a contact with that Iranian newspaper , and we would run the cartoons the same day as they publish them". However, later the same day, Jyllands-Posten's editor-in-chief said that under no circumstances would the paper reprint the Holocaust cartoons. . Flemming Rose later said that "he had made a mistake". . The next day Carsten Juste, the editor-in-chief of Jyllands-Posten, stated that Rose was on indefinite leave.

References

• RFE/RL Reports 31 January 2006, Volume 6, Number 2: Satire Vs. Self-Censorship
• The Last Word: Flemming Rose
• Flemming Rose interview: The Threat of Islamism by Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten, October 29, 2004
• Mod strømmen (Against the Stream), in Russian by Boris Yeltsin (translated by Flemming Rose to Danish), Schønberg 1990.
• Katastrofen der udeblev (The Disaster That Did Not Happen), Gyldendal, 1998.
• Velfærdsstaten tur/retur - efter socialdemokratismens sammenbrud (The Rise and Fall of the Welfare-state - after the Collapse of Social-Democracy), Gyldendal, 2005 (co-authored with several others)

• 1956 births
• Danish journalists
• Living people