Yes, there are fears associated with publishing Muhammad cartoons.

If the violent forces can win a partial victory, we cannot let them win the battle for freedom of expression.

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In 2010, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was attacked and tried to kill at his home. He was the man behind the most controversial drawing of Muhammad. It represented a man with a bomb on his turban. The question for the country’s newspaper editors quickly became: Is this a development in the four-year-old cartoon controversy that makes it natural to publish the controversial cartoon?

I was editor in chief of Bergens Tidende at the time and I thought this was news that made it necessary to publish the drawing.

We were quite alone in that decision among the big media.

It is not uncommon for publishers to make different decisions on publishing issues. It can be the profile, the tradition or the readers of the newspaper. Assessments are complex. I have always worked in a newspaper with a cartoonist. I have said no to the drawings several times, also because they have been unnecessary offensive. Like I said no to scripts or image selection for various reasons.

A feeling of being violated can be a consequence of the post, which applies to people with and without religious affiliation. But when the value of the post exceeds the price of the infringement, we will post.

That was the case with the Muhammad cartoon in 2010. Yes, it hurts some Muslims. But the course of the case, with the Westergaard assassination attempt, made it easy: of course we were going to publish. This drawing was produced in the middle of a conflict that sparked the attack on the Norwegian and Danish embassies in the Middle East. The Jyllands-Posten newspaper was the target of terrorist schemes on several occasions. Then-Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Norwegian editors have yet to answer for their handling at the time.

In the same way, it was obvious that Aftenposten published a smile by fax from the cover of Charlie Hebdo that triggered the massacre in 2015 when the trial against the defendants began a few weeks ago.

While the actual evaluation in 2010 was simple, the decision to publish was not really easy. I was affraid.

Now, in 2020, I have not felt the same fear. Norwegian police have a reasonably good overview of the most extreme environments. The debate with Muslims who believe that Muhammad’s drawings should not be published takes place with words and text.

But I felt uncomfortable. Following the execution of French teacher Samuel Paty, the riots have escalated.

In the 15 years since the cartoon controversy, I have been consistently struck by the extent to which fear is taboo among my fellow newsroom colleagues. In 2006 and the following years, the fear that employees would be injured was very real. Anything else would be strange, given what we saw around us.

The editors’ explanations of the lack of publication included a lot of strange things in 2005, and it seemed even more strange in 2010. Fear, on the other hand, appeared as an unrelated topic.

I can only speak for myself. But in this case, it’s important to be open that employee safety, and therefore fear, is also on the list when evaluations are made. These are not completely ordinary editorial decisions. Here we find a partial victory for violent Islamists.

If the violent forces can win a partial victory, we cannot let them win the battle for freedom of expression.

Aftenposten was a target mentioned in Anders Behring Breivik’s terrorist plots, without him, or other extremists’ regular mention of us as traitors, having changed our publishing strategy.

For my part, I acknowledge fear and unease precisely because I am concerned that I should not rule, no matter where the threats come from.