In the summer of 2005, the Danish artist Kåre Bluitgen, when he met a journalist from the Ritzaus Bureau news agency, said he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his book on Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Three illustrators he contacted, Bluitgen said, were too scared. A few months later, Bluitgen reported that he had found someone willing to illustrate his book, but only on the condition of anonymity.

Like most Danish newspapers, Jyllands-Posten decided to publish an article about Bluitgen’s case. To test the state of freedom of expression, Flemming Rose, Jyllands–Posten’s cultural editor at the time, called twelve cartoonists, and offered them $160 each to draw a caricature of Mohammed. What then happened is a well-known, chilling story.

In the wave of Islamist violence against the cartoons, at least two hundred people were killed. Danish products vanished from shelves in Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, the UAE and Lebanon. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of the European Union in Gaza and warned Danes and Norwegians to leave within 48 hours. In the Libyan city of Benghazi, protesters set fire to the Italian consulate. Political Islam understood what was being achieved and raised the stakes; the West did not.

An Islamic fatwa also forever changed Flemming Rose’s life. In an Islamic caricature, his head was put on a pike. The Taliban offered a bounty to anyone who would kill him. Rose’s office at the newspaper was repeatedly evacuated for bomb threats. And Rose’s name and face entered ISIS’s blacklist, along with that of the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier.

Less known is the “white fatwa” that the journalistic class imposed on Rose. This brave Danish journalist reveals it in a recently published book, “De Besatte” (“The Obsessed“). “It is the story of how fear devours souls, friendships and the professional community,” says Rose. The book reveals how his own newspaper forced Rose to surrender.

“The drama and the tragedy is that the only ones to win are the jihadists,” Flemming Rose told the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.

The CEO of Jyllands–Posten, Jørgen Ejbøl, summoned Rose to his office, and asked, “You have grandchildren, do not you think about them?”

The company that publishes his newspaper, JP/Politikens Hus, said: “It’s not about Rose, but the safety of two thousand employees.”

Jorn Mikkelsen, Rose’s former director, and the newspaper’s business heads, obliged him to sign a nine-point diktat, in which the Danish journalist accepted, among other demands, “not participating in radio and television programs”, “not attending conferences”, “not commenting on religious issues”, “not writing about the Organization of the Islamic Conference” and “not commenting on the cartoons”.

Rose signed this letter of surrender during the harshest time for the newspaper, when, in 2010-2011, there were countless attempts on his life by terrorists, and also attempts on the life of Kurt Westergaard, illustrator of a cartoon (Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) that was burned in public squares across the Arab world. Westergaard was then placed on “indefinite leave” by Jyllands-Posten “for security reasons.”

Is democracy lost? Eleven years after Jyllands-Posten published the Mohammed cartoons, the newspaper has a barbed-wire fence two meters high and one kilometer long. Kurt Westergaard, the illustrator who drew one of the cartoons (left), lives in hiding in a fortress, and Flemming Rose (right), the editor who commissioned the cartoons, has fled to the United States.

In his book, Rose also reveals that two articles were censored by his newspaper, along with an outburst from the CEO of the company, Lars Munch: “You have to stop, you’re obsessed, on the fourth floor there are people who ask ‘can’t he stop?'”.

Rose then drew more wrath from his managers when he agreed to participate in a conference with the equally targeted Dutch parliamentarian, Geert Wilders, who at this moment is on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech.” Rose writes:

He starts yelling at me, “Why the f*ck did you say yes to appear on stage with this terrorist target, are you stupid? Do you have a secret death wish? You have grandchildren now. Are you completely out of your mind? It’s okay if you want to die yourself, but why are you taking the company though all this?”

Jyllands-Posten also pressured Rose when he decided to write a book about the cartoons, “Hymne til Friheden” (“Hymn to Freedom“). His editor told him that the newspaper would “curb the harmful effects” of the book by keeping its publication as low-key as possible. Rose was then threatened with dismissal if he did not cancel two debates for the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons (Rose, in fact, did not show up that day at a conference in Copenhagen).

After the 2015 massacre at Charlie Hebdo, Rose, no longer willing to abide by the “diktat” he was ordered to sign, resigned as the head of the foreign desk of Jyllands-Posten, and now works in the U.S. for the Cato Institute think-tank. The former editor of Jyllands-Posten, Carsten Juste, who was also blacklisted by ISIS, confirmed Rose’s allegations.

Rose writes in the conclusion of his book: “I’m not obsessed with anything. The fanatics are those who want to attack us, and the possessed are my former bosses at Jyllands-Posten.”

Rose’s revelations confirm another familiar story: Jyllands-Posten‘s surrender to fear. Since 2006, each time its editors and publishers were asked if they still would have published the drawings of Mohammed, the answer has always been “no.” This response means that the editors had effectively tasked Rose with writing the newspaper for fanatics and terrorists thousands of kilometers away. Even after the January 7, 2015 massacre at the weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, targeted precisely because it had republished the Danish cartoons, Jyllands-Posten announced that, out of fear, it would not republish the cartoons:

“We have lived with the fear of a terrorist attack for nine years, and yes, that is the explanation why we do not reprint the cartoons, whether it be our own or Charlie Hebdo’s. We are also aware that we therefore bow to violence and intimidation.”

A Danish comedian, Anders Matthesen, said that the newspaper and the cartoons were to blame for the Islamist violence — the same official position as the entire European political and journalistic mainstream.

A year ago, for the 10th anniversary of the affair, instead of the cartoons, Jyllands-Posten came out with twelve white spaces. These white spaces represent what Rose, in his previous book, called “Tavshedens tiranni” (“The Tyranny of Silence“). Naser Khader, a liberal Muslim of Syrian origin who lives in Denmark, wrote:

“I do not blame them that they care about the safety of employees. I have bodyguards 24 hours a day. However, I believe that we must stand firm. If Flemming shuts his mouth, democracy will be lost.”

Is democracy lost? The headquarters of Jyllands-Posten today has a barbed-wire fence two meters high and one kilometer long, a door with double lock (as in banks), and employees can only enter one at a time by typing in a personal code (a measure that did not protect Charlie Hebdo). Meanwhile, the former editor, Carsten Juste, has withdrawn from journalism; Kurt Westergaard lives in hiding in a fortress, and Flemming Rose, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fled to the United States.

Much, certainly, looks lost. “We are not living in a ‘free society’ anymore, but in a ‘fear society'”, Rose has said.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Can a French municipality erect a statue of the Virgin Mary in a public park? The answer is No. France’s Administrative Court has given the mayor of Publier, in eastern France (population 6500), three months to comply with the ban on religious symbols in public spaces and to remove the statue. If the municipality fails to do so, it will be fined €100 ($105) a day. Mayor Gaston Lacroix said he will try to relocate the marble statue on private land.

France’s 1905 Law on the Separation of the Churches and the State (Article 2) states that “The Republic does not recognize, pay or subsidize any religious sect”; article 28 prohibits any religious symbol on public monuments.

The Virgin May statue in Publier, on the bottom of which is inscribed “Our Lady of Geneva Lake watch over your children”, has a long story. It was installed in the town park in August 2011, without debate. The statue was acquired with taxpayer money: €23,700 (USD $26,000). Acknowledging at the time that he had “joked a little with the 1905 law” on the separation of church and the state, the mayor had to sell the statue to a local religious association.

Now, the mayor has to remove the statue from the public park. He tried to privatize the piece of land where the statue is erected, but the land-sale project was rejected by the court.

This story of a statue of the Virgin Mary illustrates the difficulties of secularism, the defense of French identity, the fight against Islamism, and the contradictory interests of different political parties in France.

Originally, secularism in France was established to push religion out of the public sphere. An authentic war was conducted at the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th to push a very obscurantist Catholic Church out of all public spaces. According to historian Jacques Julliard:

“Mgr de Quélen, Archbishop of Paris, remains famous for having said ‘not only was Jesus the son of God, but his mother came from a very good family’. For the Republic, fighting the church was a fight for the liberation of the minds, for the construction of a school for knowledge (against belief) liberated from priests, the building of an open society…”

Now, after more than a century of separation of powers between church and state, an intolerant and extremist Islam is disrupting the rules of the game, invading public spaces, schools, universities and companies with the veil, halal food and open violence. But instead of uniting against this troublemaker, French society today is openly divided.

French state institutions and the political class (left and right) are fully responsible for this division, which is also the result of confusion. Instead of naming Islamism the enemy, all governments, left and right, have chosen the wrong path of appeasement and increasing concessions — refusing to name Islamism as solely responsible for terrorism, refusing to consider the Islamic veil as a tool of separatism, and letting Salafist mosques multiply — in the vain hope of calming what is claimed to be the legitimate anger of Muslims against “discrimination”.

Because the state refused or was unable to elaborate a strategy for a renewed secularism, actors on the ground (especially mayors of the 35,000 municipalities of France) were left alone. In 2014 and 2015, some of them (no one knows how many) chose to install or subsidize nativity scenes in the lobbies of their city halls. Immediately, French political passions burst into the debate.

Free thinkers, all parties of the left and the extreme left, green parties and partisans of multiculturalism went to court to fight the Christ child’s cribs. On the opposite side, some on the right and the extreme right supported the Christ child’s crib. In the middle, some supporters of secularism tried to calm everyone down, but without great success.

On November 14, 2014, the Administrative Court of Nantes decided on appeal to strike down the initial prohibition of a Christmas nativity scene in the Departmental Hall of Vendée. In another case, on October 8, 2015, the Administrative Court of Paris struck down on appeal an initial judgement authorizing the mayor of Melun to display a nativity crib.

On December 1, 2016, the Lille Administrative Court cancelled the decision of the municipality of Henin-Beaumont (affiliated with the “far right” Front National) to install a Christmas nativity crib in the lobby of City Hall.

In November 2015, just before the Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were murdered, the powerful Association of Mayors of France (AMF) relaunched the controversy by recommending, in the name of secularism, not to install Christmas nativity scenes. Immediately, three mayors from the Front National, and some others from the opposition party, Les Republicains, left the AMF. Marion Maréchal-Le Pen of the National Front, and the granddaughter of the party’s founder, stated:

“This recommendation is a provocation. Secularism is the neutrality of public authorities regarding religions, separation of Church and State, and refusal to finance any sect, but secularism does not mean the disappearance of our folk traditions that may have a religious connotation. Catholic in particular.”

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, president of Debout La France (“Stand Up France”), said AMF’s decision is “silly”. He added:

“French people cherish their culture. Some mayors put Christmas cribs in their town halls, others do not. If French people love Christmas trees, find it convenient to call Easter holidays “Easter holidays,” and have Christian cribs in city halls, let them do it. Do not cut the roots of the French, stop denying our people the right to be themselves.”

On the left, most leaders refused to comment because they were afraid to engage in a debate with the Front National.

On November 9, 2016, the Conseil d’État (Council of State), the highest administrative court in France, edited guidelines for local administrative courts to allow Christmas nativity scenes in city halls, but under strict conditions (no proselytizing). In others words, a Christian display is authorized if all elements of Christianity are removed from it. A nativity scene must be “folklore” to be authorized, and nativity cribs that belong to a religious organization remain prohibited in city halls.

If nativity scenes are an extremely ancient Christian tradition, the installation of Christmas nativity scenes in city halls is very recent. One of the oldest was inaugurated in 1989. In most instances, displaying nativity scenes was a reaction to try to preserve French culture, and a claim to preserve the Christian roots of France — mostly, and without saying it — against Islam.

François Fillon, a former Prime Minister of France, who is running for president in the 2017 election as the candidate of the main center-right party, welcomed the decision of the Council of State. In Valeurs Actuelles, he said:

“Christmas has long since left the only sectarian domain, the one of religion, to get into the cultural universe, that of civilization… By making the public space empty of everything that brings us together, by sucking everything that makes the thickness and depth of the collective being French, secularism is, paradoxically, the useful idiot of sectarianism: all the space it empties, Islamists are eager to fill it, especially in disillusioned, brainless and uprooted young heads”.

In France, François Fillon (right), a former Prime Minister who is running for president in the 2017 election, welcomed a recent court decision to allow Christmas nativity scenes in city halls.

This argument, of “secularism as a vacuum”, was also developed by Philippe de Villiers, a prominent figure of the right and founder of Movement for France (MPF). In the weeks before the Council of State’s decision, Villiers gave an interview to Le Figaro entitled, “Yes to nativity cribs, No to djallabas“. He explained:

“I expect the Council of State to make the choice, not of a secular vacuum, which would be an in-draft to Islam, but to make the choice of a living secularism, which is consistent with our traditions…. The Council of State said “yes” to the burkini. If they say “no” to Christmas nativity scenes, (they) will no longer be the Council of State of France that protects us. They will become the Council of Islamic State”.

The debate seems booby-trapped. Because the left has been unable to renew and impose secularism, today the “right” and Islamists have agreed to get rid of it.

“Secularism is just becoming a religion opposed to all other religions”, said Tariq Ramadan, a prominent figure of the Muslim Brotherhood in Switzerland and France, in 2014. He congratulated mayors on Christmas nativity scenes probably because he sees it as an opening for Islamic opportunities in the public sphere. “We need a Republic authorizing the visibility of diversity, and not a Republic of neutrality,” Ramadan said.

Yves Mamou is a journalist and author based in France. He worked for two decades for the daily, Le Monde, before his retirement.

On January 12, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published an article about Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his senior adviser: “The Jew Kushner reportedly pushed for David M. Friedman as the new ambassador to Israel”, Aftenposten wrote. The newspaper had later to apologize for calling Kushner “the Jew”.

A few weeks earlier, the city council of Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city, passed a motion calling on its residents to boycott Israeli goods — a city aspiring to be “Israel-free”. Then it was the turn of another Norwegian city, Tromso, population 72,000, whose city council approved a similar motion. More than 40% of Norwegians are already boycotting Israeli products or are in favor of doing so, according to a poll.

What hell is happening in Scandinavia, whose countries, Norway and Sweden, are bastions of political correctness, champions of multiculturalism and, according to the Global Peace Index, the most “peaceful” countries in the world? “The most successful society the world has ever known”, however, as The Guardian labelled Sweden, has a dark side: Israel-slandering and anti-Semitism.

Sweden and Norway are manipulating public opinion in the way immortalized by George Orwell in his novel “1984” as the “Two Minutes Hate”. These countries have seen the creation of a public opinion according to which Israel is a merciless enemy of humanity that ought to be dismantled forthwith.

A year ago, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, an updated map of Israel’s friends and enemies. Only five countries are openly at war with the Jewish State: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea. Then there are the friendly countries, including many non-Muslim African countries that once had no diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. But the map also included a European country that for the first time moved into the “non-friends” camp: Sweden.

Hate for Israel has become a real obsession in Scandinavia, which revived the glorious partnership between the liberal “useful idiots” — the ones concerned about equality and minorities — and Islamists, the ones concerned about submission and killing “infidels”.

Despite the fact that Jews in Norway are only 0.003 percent of the total population, Oslo is now world’s capital of European anti-Semitism. Recently, the Norwegian National Theater opened its Festival in Oslo with a dramatic video clip. The video urged a boycott of the National Theater of Israel, Habima, in Tel Aviv. Funded by the government and aired at the festival, the clip shows an actress posing as a spokesman for the National Theater and calling for a boycott of the Israeli theater. Pia Maria Roll labelled Israel a state “based on ethnic cleansing, racism, occupation and apartheid”. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded saying that the seven-minute video recalls “the Norwegian collaborationist Vidkun Quisling and Knut Hamson” (a Nobel laureate for Literature who sympathized with Hitler).

It is not the first time. A festival in Oslo also rejected a documentary, “The Other Dreamers,” about the lives of disabled children, simply because it was Israeli. “We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel,” wrote Ketil Magnussen, the founder of the festival.

Norway is the European country most engaged in the campaigns against Israel. All Norwegian universities refused to host Alan Dershowitz for a speaking tour about the Middle East. A proposal for an official academic boycott against Israel was promoted by Norway’s University of Trondheim. If approved, the boycott would have been the first of its kind in a European university since the Nazi boycott of Jewish professors.

The Norwegian Ministry of Finance has excluded Israeli companies, such as Africa Israel Investments and Danya Cebus, from its Global Pension Fund, a fund that invests the national wealth in foreign stocks and bonds, and which holds more than one percent of all global stocks. The Norwegian trade union EL & IT, which represents workers from the energy and telecommunications sectors, has boycotted the Histadrut, Israel’s national labor union.

In Norway, anti-Semitism has affected many “intellectuals”. One is Johan Galtung, a Norwegian sociologist dubbed the “father of peace studies“, a proud leftist who made anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli statements at the University of Oslo and who claimed (falsely) that there is a link between the perpetrators of the massacre at Utoya in Norway and the Mossad.

Norwegian newspapers are full of classic anti-Semitic tropes. A cartoon in the largest newspaper, Verdens Gang, showed the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s feet as those of an animal. In Aftenposten, the second-largest newspaper, a rat eats the Star of David, the symbol in the Israeli flag. Another daily, Dagbladet, a glory of the Norwegian Left, published a cartoon in which Palestinian terrorists leave an Israeli prison with the German motto of the Buchenwald concentration camp: “Jedem Das Sein“.

Evelyne Zeira, who works at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, asked a Norwegian researcher, Ingrid Harbitz, to send her material to develop treatments for Palestinian victims of thalessemia, a blood disease. Harbitz’s answer was: “Due to the current situation in the Middle East, I will not deliver material to Israeli universities”. To her, Israeli Jews and even Palestinians do not deserve Norwegian blood!

During Israel’s war against Hezbollah in 2006, the daily Aftenposten published an article by Jostein Gaarder, Norway’s most famous writer and a “thirdworldist”, in which he imagined the destruction of Israel. Gaarder, whose novel “Sophie’s World” has been translated into 53 languages ​​and has sold millions of copies, justified the expulsion of Israeli Jews from their land. “We no longer recognize the State of Israel,” Gaarder wrote, as if he were an Iranian imam.

The same racism exists in Sweden.

A few days ago, the Swedish Parliament discussed a deal between Volvo, the country’s most important car maker, and the Israeli bus companies. Volvo provides, in fact, some buses which keep the Israelis alive in Judea and Samaria. Jewish schoolchildren in these areas have to use armored buses to avoid being shot and murdered by Palestinian terrorists. But according to the chairman of Sweden’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, Kenneth G. Forslund, their right to life, granted by Volvo’s buses, is “a violation of international law”. Swedish dockworkers sponsored a week-long boycott of Israeli ships and goods. The old good days when Swedish ships saved the Jews from Nazis are gone.

Sweden’s former Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Mehmet Kaplan, a Muslim of Turkish origin, took part in the pro-Hamas assault against Israel by the “Freedom Flotilla” in 2010. He compared Israel to Nazism and called for the “liberation of Jerusalem”. The education minister, Gustav Fridolin, has been arrested for protesting in front of the anti-terrorism fence built by Israel in Judea and Samaria to protect the lives of their citizens on the coastal plain, massacred by suicide bombers.

Recently, Swedish public television broadcast “The Occupation of the American Mind“, a conspiracy film about the “Israeli Lobby” supposedly controlling in the United States. During the Second Intifada, in a Stockholm Museum, a photograph was reprinted of a smiling Palestinian suicide bomber, who had killed dozens of Israelis at a restaurant in Haifa. In the photograph, he was on a white boat in a bathtub full of blood-red liquid. Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, then ran an article by Donald Bostrom where, without any evidence, he charged the Israeli army of harvesting the organs of Palestinians.

Dagens Nyheter, the most sophisticated Swedish newspaper, published a violently anti-Semitic op-ed entitled, “It is allowed to hate the Jews”, in which the historian Jan Samuelson said that until Israel ceases to “occupy” the territories, hatred for the Jewish State will be justified. He totally disregards, however, that the Jordanians illegally seized the territories in the aggression they initiated against Israel in the War of 1948; in 1967, Israel, in fact liberated its own land from illegal Jordanian occupation.

After Trump’s election, the daily Dagens Nyheter ran an anti-Semitic cartoon, in which the Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President-elect were being carried by an Orthodox Jew, a Ku Klux Klan member and a gun-carrying man branded with the Israeli flag. The Nazi daily Der Stürmer could not have drawn it better.

After the massacres of November 13 in Paris, Sweden’s minister of Foreign Affairs, Margot Wallström, said that “to counter the radicalization we have to go back to the situation in the Middle East where the Palestinians see that there is no future for them and must accept a desperate situation and resort to violence”.

Does Wallström really mean that to defeat Islamic aggression, Israel must surrender? The Palestinians’ situation is indeed desperate, but as they have had full autonomy for decades, their desperate situation is caused by their own cynical and corrupt leaders who appear deliberately to keep their people in misery try to blame it on Israel, in the same way that people maim children to make them “better” beggars.

Meanwhile, the Trondheim synagogue has become one of the best protected buildings in Norway, and Jews live under siege in the Swedish city of Malmö. Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi collaborationist, would have been proud of his heirs, even if now they are self-proclaimed “progressives”.

In January 2009, an Arab mob in Malmö pelted a peaceful Jewish demonstration with bottles, eggs and smoke bombs. The police pushed the Jews, who had a permit for their gathering, into an alley.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.