As an example, I mentioned the discussion around the so-called Muhammad cartoons that had been published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ten years earlier. The cartoons grew notorious after they were reprinted in a Norwegian magazine, spurring outrage and protests across the Middle East. In January 2006, gunmen raided the European Union’s office in Gaza, demanding an apology. Jyllands-Posten apologized, but newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain reprinted the cartoons as a mark of defiance. Danish and Norwegian embassies across the Middle East were attacked. That February, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons and was sued by Muslim groups for publicly insulting Islam, a claim that was later dismissed.
In 2008, several Danish papers, including Jyllands-Posten, reprinted one of the cartoons. Osama bin Laden responded with a video threatening revenge. In the years that followed, a Somali Muslim was jailed for entering the home of a Danish cartoonist with an ax and a knife, five men were arrested for allegedly planning a massacre at Jyllands-Posten, and Charlie Hebdo’s offices were burned and its website attacked after it published more Muhammad cartoons. In 2013, two years before the Paris attacks, the magazine was sued again by Muslim groups for inciting racial hatred.
What the whole world remembers are the pictures of violent protests in various countries, some radical groups calling for the killing of the cartoonists, and several Muslim countries boycotting Danish products. Politicians and journalists in Europe immediately spoke about freedom of speech, and for weeks and months there were debates about whether Muslims were capable of living in a democracy.
But the story of the “Muhammad cartoons” wasn’t that simple. For an earlier book, Die Kinder des Dschidad (The Children of Jihad), my coauthors and I had gone to Denmark and researched the whole story. We learned that before the Muhammad cartoons were published, Jyllands-Posten had refused to print cartoons depicting Jesus in a derogatory manner because they believed those drawings would hurt readers’ feelings.
I told this story to my fellow guests. D?pfner said he had never heard this, and if it turned out to be true, it would indeed be a scandal. It occurred to me that many people didn’t seem to know even the basic facts about these controversies. They didn’t seem to understand that by enforcing double standards and being unwilling to engage in an honest and healthy discussion about ethics, freedom of speech, and hate speech, the West would keep losing more young Europeans into the hands of radicals who told them that the West was at war against Islam.
When I checked my email, Twitter, and Facebook accounts after the debate, I found a few supportive messages from people who said they were grateful that I’d stood my ground.
But there were many more attacks and threats. Some urged me to “pack and go back to Turkey.” I was called a “Muslim bitch” and a “whore.” A couple of people seemed especially upset about my “daring to contradict a German man like Mr. D?pfner.”
There were also two threats against my life. “We will get you,” one email read. It contained an attachment with drawings of knives and guns. The other message called me an “enemy of the German race” and said that I would soon be dealt with.
I spoke to one of my police sources about the emails. He told me to keep an eye out for similar messages and cautioned me not to reveal my home address. Even publicly identifying my home city could be dangerous, he told me.
The backlash after the TV roundtable followed me for some time. Two journalist friends stopped speaking to me because they were upset by my suggestion that we needed to talk as a society about where freedom of speech ended and hate speech began. During a heated debate with another journalist at a friend’s dinner party, I asked why, if freedom of speech was sacrosanct, I was being attacked and threatened simply for saying what I thought.
“All those Muslims who are complaining about our freedom of speech or who feel offended by our cartoons and our values, they don’t belong here and should just leave,” she replied.
I told her that if she wanted to ban Muslims or other people from speaking freely and peacefully raising questions, it would be the beginning of the end for “freedom of speech.” The whole time, I couldn’t stop wondering where we were heading if even people who considered themselves liberal intellectuals were trying to ban speech that made them uncomfortable. “So does that mean the ‘good and acceptable’ Muslim has to shut up, not participate in intellectual debate, and shouldn’t dare to disagree with the prevailing wisdom?” I asked. Or are people like me, who have lived here all our lives, to keep quiet, or else we will be seen as siding with Al Qaeda or ISIS? I didn’t say this out loud, but it weighed on my mind.
I said that killing journalists or people who drew unpopular cartoons should never be an option. But I also asked if she was aware that there had been a time when Jews had been attacked in cartoons in Germany, too. Hadn’t we been taught in school that something like that shouldn’t happen again?
14
The Search for an Islamist Beatle, or Finding Jihadi John
Britain, 2014–15
The email from David Bradley arrived one day in October 2014. Bradley was the chairman of Atlantic Media in Washington, DC, the publisher of the Atlantic and several other U.S. media outlets. I didn’t know him personally, but he was contacting me as part of a mission to free several journalists who had been kidnapped by ISIS.
“I’m raising a topic that may tax your sources unfairly,” Bradley wrote. “I’m writing you to ask if you have any idea how I can open a back channel to the ISIS leadership.”
Bradley’s connection to the ISIS hostages had begun with James Foley, a freelance journalist from New Hampshire who had been kidnapped in Syria in November 2012. Bradley had gotten to know Foley’s family a year earlier, when Foley had been held hostage in Libya. Bradley had helped free Foley along with another reporter, Clare Gillis, who was freelancing for the Atlantic.
This time, Foley had been captured in Syria while on assignment for the website GlobalPost, along with the photographer John Cantlie. Foley was moved often and tortured. By the spring of 2014, he and several other hostages had reportedly been moved to a prison on a mountain fifteen miles east of the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was now the capital of the Islamic State. The whole place was a heavily fortified military zone; by now its existence was an open secret. It was known locally as one of the three most important ISIS prisons in Raqqa Province. Even Amnesty International knew about it.
The U.S. military had raided the prison in July, but by then the hostages had been moved again. Foley’s family received a final email from his captors in early August, and two weeks later he was beheaded; a video of his killing was posted to YouTube on August 19. In September, the group executed Steven Sotloff, another American journalist.