Dr. Jakob Skovgaard-Peterson:

Thank you. These will be some very immediate responses to these papers. When I left two days ago from Denmark and, I'm afraid you've already heard enough about Denmark, the morning papers, three out of four of the big morning papers were about Muslims. The headlines. It was about a possible terror cell in the city of Arhus, Denmark. And it was about a new league of anti-Sharia, which various politicians from right and left would be joining due to discussions about stoning and so on and so forth. So Muslims are very much in the media in Denmark as elsewhere in Europe. But I couldn't help thinking that this is, in a way, as it should be. Shouldn’t there be headlines if there is a possible terror cell in Arhus, Denmark. Shouldn't there be headlines about such a league? I think so and we should be very careful discussing, in particular, in a group like this that we don't really ask the media to function in a way that media do not function. And this has to be also partly Roger Hardy's comment, but at the same time it's a given fact that the ways Muslims figure in these media do have a lot of repercussion on Muslims who have absolutely nothing to do with stoning or terrorism or whatever. There is a kind of guilt by association, which we never saw, for instance, when German Bader Meinhof terrorists hid out in Denmark 20 years ago. Nobody would sort of move from those persons to Germans in general, but the public tends to do this when the talk is about Muslims and, as several of you have said in the last panel, there is a kind of burden of proof on Muslims now to prove themselves as good citizens in a place like Denmark, very much in the j'accuse tradition we'd use a hundred years ago. So I think that the point should be taken that there is a lot of negative media image. It doesn't spring out of nothing, but somehow, the public is very willing to use it in ways which some reflection would tell most of us not to and the question, of course, is what do we do about this.

I think also I'd also like to comment a little bit upon Al-Jazeera and the way this covering, this issue, because I don't think the coverage in Al-Jazeera, from what I have seen, of Muslims in Europe is among its very best subjects, although I’m quite a fan of Al-Jazeera in many ways. There is this interesting phenomenon in Europe right now that we are moving towards political integration, but we don't really have an integrated public sphere, we read Danish newspapers or Swedish newspapers, but positions are taken in Brussels, whereas in the Arab world you see the opposite picture. There is a move toward public sphere, but there's no political coordination. The Arab League is no more important than at other times in recent history, so I think this is very interesting. Imbalance in both places, both in Europe and in the Arab world. And Al-Jazeera is covering a lot of things, it has a lot of coverage, for instance, on September the 11th, it did a very long evening on the United States, which I found was very good, but when it comes to Europe and maybe it is, as Roger Hardy said, it has an important constituency, it has an important audience in Europe, it tends to be quite simplistic, or that's my impression at least. Al-Jazeera has a tendency, at least, to look at the world as peopled with a lot of decent ordinary people and "really corrupt powers that be." And it works very well in many Middle Eastern societies and it also works, to a degree, in Europe, but this victimized man in the street in Europe makes for a lot of discussion on Al-Jazeera of European racism, but fairly little criticism and debate about Muslim participation in Europe, I think, but this is, people have other impressions. And I think this is important because your last comment that the fact that Muslims, or Arab speaking people in Britain would actually follow British elections through Al-Jazeera, you said that this was a maybe a kind of worrying, I would say this reflects very much on how it covers these events. It can actually mean that people who have been little exposed to political debate and political culture and for language reasons and so on and so forth, would have a hard time following British media and this would actually be introduced to some of this through Arab media and I do think this also happens to a certain degree, but my feeling is that it could have a even more effect if some of the Arab stations would change their editorial policy on Europe somewhat. And this is also a kind of response to Roger Hardy's comment when he says the market is going to regulate this, we'll have to wait and see, to me this is somewhat too mechanistic. I think we can do a lot, especially on the editorial level and some of these efforts should be balancing criticism and not just using Muslims in Europe to say "Oh Europe has got its own problems" as is very much the dynamic very often when the Arab television channels cover Muslims and Arabs in Europe.

Now moving onto a second subject. I would very much agree with Roger Hardy that September 11 has actually had a big impact on the media image of Muslims in Europe. It has accentuated tendencies already there. Things we've been discussing like the difficulty of integrating Muslims, Muslims being seen more as a threat, but I would also say that, at least from the Danish media, I would say that we see a certain tendency to politicize the knowledge about Islam. People like myself and others who have been writing about Islam in Denmark are suddenly criticized because we are said to be politically correct and so on and so forth. And this is, I think, a kind of Americanization or polarization of the debate in Denmark. You wouldn't have that before. There would be a certain respect for a university professor discussing this, because everybody else knew they knew little about it. But a certain new groups of intellectuals and journalists have come up who are extremely skeptical about the public knowledge of Islam, which is considered too apologetic, too Saidian in a way and they get a lot of their ideas from the internet and from American debates on this, which have been very harsh as you have known since September the 11th. I would say there's not only an Islamophobia, but there is a kind of growing Islamist-phobia that, at least, we've never seen before in Denmark. But maybe its Denmark compared, at least, to Sweden, which I also follow, is very different on that particular issue. And some of the things we see is also is some of the Muslim spokesmen are being questioned. The notion of tahrir meaning not that the individual Muslim, as someone mentioned, could hide his true identity if he were a shia or an ismaili or whatever, but meaning that he's hiding his motives and that he's representing some kind of world conspiracy or something has led to a kind of character assassination of some young Muslims in Denmark who represent or are members of Minhaj Koran or similar organizations. And this kind of vary polarized debate where you're actually trying to negate their voice in public debate, we wouldn't see that before September the 11th and I think this is also a kind of aggravation, which to my mind, has something to do with a much greater focus on the American debate on Islam after September the 11th.

Finally I think that the notion of Muslim civilization and that maybe why some nations are always singled out, that this notion of civilization has gained in acceptance in the public debate, also by people who defended it, but it is seen as actually describing a state of affairs where Muslims do share a lot, no matter where from they come, from Turkey or Bangladesh and so on and so forth as we've already discussed. You can speak about Muslim atheist or a Muslim communist or a Muslim social-democrat and so on and the Muslim thing tends to be the one really stressed. This again is partly due to the kind of books which are now being translated on Islam to the Danish audience, if may stick to what I know most about.