By Mona Eltahawy
Jerusalem Report
Oct. 12, 2009

This is the story of how I got my first death threat. He told me by e-mail, in Arabic, that if he ever saw me walking anywhere he would kill me. He translated the “I will kill you” part into English, just in case.

Friends, real and on Facebook, had rung alarm bells for me before the e-mail found me in a hotel room in the Danish city of Aarhus – I’ll explain the irony of that location later – warning me there was something rotten and it only tangentially had to do with Denmark.

The high-tech crime unit in Aarhus traced the e-mail’s IP address to just outside of Cairo, Egypt. I’m not so worried about him. Before his e-mail, I’d been asked countless times if my life was ever threatened and I was always quite happy to answer in the negative.

I’m more worried that some detractors have suggested I made the threat up for “fame” and attention. I point them to “news sites” where the sections for reader comments go unmoderated and fester within them the ugliest kind of incitement and hate. That man in Giza is just the tip of an ugly iceberg.

I absolutely oppose any kind of censorship of the Internet. Generation Facebook – the young people who blog and use social networking sites to express themselves in unprecedented ways and to challenge authority – have to figure it out for themselves. Most media outlets’ comments section are full of nuts – the Middle East has no advantage there. But when “news sites” leave threats of violence unmoderated, it is way beyond nuts.

The day before the death threat popped up in my Inbox, I had published an opinion column in The Washington Post about Yale University Press’s decision to pull the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad and all images from the first academic study of the Danish cartoon crisis, to be published in November.

I didn’t find the cartoons offensive but I know many Muslims did, including my own mother with whom I declared a détente from our arguments about them by agreeing not to discuss them. In my column, I called Yale Press cowardly and accused them of giving in to extremists on all sides – a non-Muslim one that hijacked the issue to fuel racism against immigrants in Denmark, and a Muslim one that hijacked the issue to silence Muslims and fuel anti-Western rhetoric.

Rather than paraphrase my column, I refer you to links on my website and blog. Suffice to say I like to think I made a nuanced argument on a highly-charged issue that by no means has ever been as simple as “Danish newspaper publishes cartoons, Muslim world goes berserk.”

At least four months passed without incident between their publication at the end of September 2005 in Jyllands-Posten and the violent demonstrations that claimed at least 200 Muslim lives in 2006. Into that time lag fell a lot of political and religious manipulation as regimes and Islamists competed in outrage and whipped up a frenzy that spun out of control.

And my nuanced argument fell into the lag between my English language column and a translation into Arabic, which so elevated cherry picking that I’m tempted to call it not yellow journalism but yellow translation. Throwing nuance to the wind, a “news service,” called America in Arabic, picked out the most controversial parts of my column and translated them into Arabic for its media clients in the Arab world.

Why would they bother to include the part in my column that explained the Danish author of “The Cartoons that Shook the World” had wanted to include the cartoons not for sensationalism but to make her argument that they were similar in form to the anti-Semitic cartoons in 1930s Europe?

Just in case the cherries they picked from my column weren’t sexy enough, America in Arabic then added that it was worth remembering that Yale Press’s decision had also met with criticism from the American Jewish Committee, “one of the most prominent pro-Israel lobbies.” It was a “news” story, you see, and that was their contribution to “reporting.”

Now imagine that “story” on those Internet news sites with the unmoderated comments.

So vile were some of the comments that several people I’ve never met but who follow my work via Facebook wrote to complain to one of those sites. I wrote to them, too, telling them that the “article” from America in Arabic had led to a death threat. I later discovered other threats on their site, including one woman who said she wished she could kill me with her bare hands. Others on the site called for religious authorities to declare me an apostate, a form of excommunication.

Someone from the website replied to tell me they were looking into my complaint and said that they weren’t the only site to publish the America in Arabic article.

About that location in Denmark: Aarhus is home to Jyllands- Posten, the paper that published the cartoons. The Danish media went overboard: Wasn’t I scared? Was I looking over my shoulder? I was in Aarhus to speak at an arts festival. TV cameras followed me and my festival guide as we walked through tourist sites. No, I wasn’t scared – here I am walking openly through Aarhus.

Danish journalist Martin Krasnik who interviewed me at a soldout event joked that the Aarhus Festival sent me the death threat. You take your comic relief where you can find it.

Soon after I returned from Denmark, a Turk hacked my website and blog. “For Islam,” he wrote.

Not my Islam, I say.