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Flemming Rose (born March 11 1958) is a Danish journalist, author and the current cultural editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. He was responsible for the first publishing of the cartoons in the Muhammed cartoons crisis. He is currently on indefinite leave from his newspaper, after a controversial offer to reprint Iranian cartoons of the Holocaust.

Life

Rose has a major in Russian language and literature from University of Copenhagen. From 1990 to 1996 he was the Moscow correspondent for the newspaper Berlingske Tidende. Between 1996 and 1999 he was the correspondent for the same newspaper in Washington, D.C.. In 1999 he became Moscow correspondent for the newspaper Jyllands-Posten and January 2005 the cultural editor of that paper (KulturWeekend).

Cartoon crisis

Rose is best known for commissioning the drawings of Muhammad in the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon crisis on 30 September 2005. He later said that he did so because he felt he had seen too many examples of self-censorship because of possible threats from Muslims.

When asked: "But you depicted Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, armed with a knife and with a broken halo that resembled satanic horns."

Flemming replied: The cartoon with horns didn't arouse special criticism; it was the other two. The one with the bomb in his turban doesn't say, "All Muslims are terrorists," but says, "Some people have taken Islam hostage to permit terrorist and extremist acts." These cartoons do not treat Muslims in any other way than we treat other citizens in this country. By treating them as equals, we are saying, "You are equal."

When asked whether he had any regrets about commisioning the cartoons, he said, "That is a hypothetical question. I would say that I do not regret having commissioned those cartoons and I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt Friday night at the discotheque." (Jyllands-Posten 11 Dec. 2005; Politiken 16 Dec. 2005)

Holocaust Cartoons

On 8 February 2006, Flemming Rose said in interviews with CNN and TV 2 that Jyllands-Posten planned to reprint satirical cartoons depicting the Holocaust that the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri planned to publish. He told CNN "My newspaper is trying to establish a contact with that Iranian newspaper Hamshahri, and we would run the cartoons the same day as they publish them". Later that day the paper's editor-in-chief said that Jyllands-posten under no circumstances would publish the Holocaust cartoons. and Flemming Rose later said that "he had made a mistake". . The next day Carsten Juste, the editor-in-chief of Jyllands-Posten, stated that Flemming Rose was on indefinite leave.

Works

• Mod strømmen (Against the Stream), in Russian by Boris Yeltsin (translated by Flemming Rose to Danish), Schønberg 1990.
• Katastrofen der udeblev (The Disaster that did not Happen), Gyldendal, 1998.
• Velfærdsstaten tur/retur - efter socialdemokratismens sammenbrud (The Rise and Fall of the Welfare-state - after the Collapse of Social-Democracy), Gyldendal, 2005 (Editor)

External links

• RFE/RL Reports 31 January 2006, Volume 6, Number 2: Satire Vs. Self-Censorship
• The Last Word: Flemming Rose
• Image of Rose
• Why I Published Those Cartoons An op-ed by Rose in the February 19, 2006 Washington Post
• "The threat of Islam", Flemming Rose's interview with Daniel Pipes

• 1958 births
• Danish journalists
• Living people