Our response to the Copenhagen attacks will define us By Hugh Muir

We are in perilous territory. Free speech must be defended, but without resorting to provocation for its own sake.
 

Police say they have killed gunman behind attacks in Copenhagen - video.

 

It is extraordinary that anyone involved should be able to describe the events in Copenhagen yesterday with understatement, but Helle Merete Brix managed to do just that. “I heard a bang. I thought someone had dropped something,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live this morning. The station then played audio of the moment the event – to celebrate the anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and which Merete Brix was chairing – was attacked from outside. The rapid, chilling clatter of gunfire seems to go on indefinitely. There is no doubt that what was envisaged was a massacre.
Merete Brix said she and the most likely specific target, the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, were quickly ushered to a safe part of the building, where they waited for 30 minutes. They “held hands and told bad jokes”. This sort of stoicism may be necessary in the months to come.

 

Police officers control the street in front of a synagogue in Krystalgade in Copenhagen. (Photograph: Fabian Bimmer/Reuters)

 

The Danish events are shocking in themselves: the attack on those who might support the publication of images of the prophet Muhammad, and then the murderous assault on Jews and a symbol of Judaism – the synagogue outside which a security guard was shot in the head.

But as shocking as this is the sense that six weeks after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities, we may be lurching towards a new normal. The sudden, massively violent, militaristic attack on intellectual discourse, the involvement of hard to track assailants: in Paris a small, tight group; in Denmark – it appears – a lone-wolf attacker. There will be multiple repercussions and an even greater need for robust and visible security whenever discussions of this sort occur. That can only degrade the quality and diversity of those debates, and yet it is vital that those discussions continue to occur with all parties free to attend and free to speak their minds.

There will also be a need to provide even greater reassurance to Jewish communities. The Charlie Hebdo attack led to the tightening of security around synagogues and other centres of communal activity, and we know that anxieties are as high as we have seen them in this country. It is essential that as this crisis plays out, Jews, their daily lives and their acts of worship are not singled out. If there is to be a new normal in which protest is advanced through murder, it must be confronted with determined solidarity among all communities, as must all hate crimes.

We are in perilous territory. Slaughter as political protest cannot be defended. Free speech as legal and moral pre-requisites in a free society must be defended. But there are also other obligations to be laid upon those who wish to live in peaceful, reasonably harmonious societies. Even after Paris, even after Denmark, we must guard against the understandable temptation to be provocative in the publication of these cartoons if the sole objective is to establish that we can do so. With rights to free speech come responsibilities.

That seems to me the moral approach, but there is a practical issue here too. There is no negotiating with men with guns. If progress is to come, it will be via dialogue with the millions of faithful Muslims who would never think to murder but also abhor publication of these cartoons. We cannot have that conversation in a time and spirit of provocation. And to have it would not be an act of weakness. The strong approach is not necessarily to do what is possible, but to do what is right.

 

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