A Danish newspaper set off a firestorm when it published controversial cartoons of the Prophet

Muhammad. The more there is a culture of perceiving blasphemy as a serious crime, the more religious

violence you have in society. The key to free speech is courage. You have to cultivate

tolerance in order to cultivate a culture of free speech.

Many politicians who favor diversity when it comes to religion, ethnicity and culture,

they do not welcome the same diversity when it comes to speech.

Hello, I'm Fraser Myers, Deputy Editor of Spikes. I'm delighted to be joined by Fleming Rose. Fleming, you were at one point the culture editor of a Danish newspaper

called Yerlands Posten, and you published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

that shook the world. People will know this internationally as the Danish

Muhammad cartoons controversy. It sparked an extraordinary amount of violence. I think there

have been 200 deaths linked to this incident.

You yourself have had to live under security protection. Can you take us back to the beginning

of the story? Why did you publish these cartoons? What was the original context?

Thanks for invitation, Fras and thanks for having me.

The important thing here is that those cartoons didn't come out of the blue.

It's just that it's not that I or somebody else thought,

well, let's see if we can offend millions of Muslims out there.

They were published as part of an internal debate in Denmark that also had some external

dimensions.

And it began in the middle of August in 2005,

when a Danish children's writer went public.

He went to the Danish newswire service, Ritzauer,

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