Danes move on after cartoon flap

COPENHAGEN

Ground zero for the feared clash of civilizations appears to be a remarkably civilized place.

On the bustling, bike-thronged streets of Denmark’s capital city, it is hard to find evidence of the grim frustrations that made this tidy country the center of a global furor over freedom and faith that, at its height, threatened to pit the West against the Muslim world in a no-win debate over fundamental values.

The situation also reflected a crisis facing Denmark and other European countries struggling to assimilate large numbers of immigrants from Muslim lands — immigrants often largely isolated from the native population and suspicious of the secular, liberal culture in which they now live.

“I think we have moved beyond the cartoon controversy, but it was certainly an unusual thing for a small country such as ours to find itself the focus of such a heated situation,” Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen acknowledged in a recent interview in his Copenhagen office.

But Denmark has been changed, in ways many would not have predicted a short while ago.

Mr. Rasmussen’s center-right government, the focus of considerable domestic and international criticism in handling the “cartoon controversy,” is stronger of late in the polls, while the center-left opposition Social Democrats founder. The populist Danish People’s Party, coalition partner with the prime minister’s Liberal Party, also gained because of its tough stand on immigration issues.

Yet, Denmark’s single most popular political figure is a Muslim, Naser Khader, a Syrian-born moderate member of parliament who founded a post-cartoon movement — called Democratic Muslims — to promote the peaceful fusion of Danish values, political liberty and Islam. Mr. Khader, 42, is seen as a rising star in Danish politics, and his own party recently reorganized its top ranks to give him greater visibility.

Meanwhile, the Copenhagen imam whom many here blame for fanning Arab and Muslim fury last winter, just as it appeared the fires had been contained, announced May 11 that he was leaving Denmark for the Palestinian territories because of the intense criticism directed at him.

“I no longer want to be the object of [press] manipulation all the time and to be linked to terrorism while I am working day and night and with much sincerity for the well-being of this country,” Ahmed Abu Laban, of the radical Danish Islamic Community, said in a newspaper interview.

“I could have provoked a revolt, created hell in Denmark, led Muslims to react violently, but did not do so,” he said.

Soren Espersen, foreign-policy spokesman for the Danish People’s Party, argued that the domestic debate, carried out with characteristic Danish bluntness, had been a healthy exercise.

“We have always praised how most of the Danish Muslims reacted in this affair,” Mr. Espersen said. “It was only when this became a big issue with the dictatorships in the Middle East and in Asia that the world had a problem.

“This is an issue that you can’t deal with in a dictatorship, [but one] that we have proven we can talk about here in a democracy,” he added.

Soaring tensions

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