By Donald H. Harrison 

Ever since Exodus by Leon Uris, I have liked the Danes although I found out later that a story told in the book was a myth.  King Christian X never donned a yellow Jewish armband to show his royal defiance of the Nazi occupation.  He may have been sympathetic to the Jews, but the grand gesture described in Exodus never happened.  What did happen, of course, was that the Danes—learning of a planned Nazi roundup of the Jews—helped smuggle most of their Jewish population to neutral Sweden, thus sparing them from the ovens of the concentration camps.

Nancy and I traveled on one meaningful vacation  to Copenhagen, where we interviewed a woman known as the "Girl in the Red Hat" during the war. This wonderful woman helped direct Jews to the fishing boats in which they were hidden for the short trip to Sweden.  Asked why she helped, she rejected any notion that she and her compatriots were heroes, or even out of the ordinary.  Jews were fellow Danes, she said. Rescuing them simply was the right thing to do for their fellow countrymen.

I had believed that Danes were the most tolerant people on earth, and perhaps the biggest-hearted. But a recent news story has me wondering whether that, unfortunately, could be changing.  

Recently, a cartoonist in one of the popular Danish publications conflated the images of a terrorist and Muhammad, drawing atop the Prophet's head a turban made to look like a burning bomb.  Muslims quite appropriately were outraged, but neither the cartoonist nor the publication will consider an apology.  Denmark is a country that values its freedom of speech, they said.  Provocative cartoons are par for the course, part of the culture. They say the 200,000 Muslims living in Denmark should learn to accept Danish culture.

I remember how hurt our local Jewish community was when the San Diego Union-Tribune printed anti-Jewish cartoons on its editorial pages.  One offending image that returns to mind was one that had a huge Star of David stabbing the Palestinian population to death.  Even though we Jews long ago have learned to appreciate freedom of speech in America, we were nevertheless offended by a symbol of our religion being turned into a weapon. 

So surely we can understand how upset Muslims are that their Prophet was similarly savaged.  Just because you're free to do something, doesn't mean that you should.  We ought to treat each other's religions with respect!

I hope that our community will join the Muslims in denouncing the cartoon, and in demanding  that such kinds of cruel drawings be banished from the political discourse.  I also insist that newspapers in Muslim countries should  stop demeaning Judaism in their cartoons.  As they do not want to be dehumanized nor see their religion ridiculed, neither do we.  

During World War II there were some Danes who sided with the Nazis against the Jews notwithstanding the prevailing attitude of sympathy for our people  The fact is there always will be some who are intolerant of others; every society unfortunately has its share of haters. And, it's the haters, people like this cartoonist who stigmatize whole groups of people for the misdeeds of a few,  who are to blame for the current flare up of tensions between the majority Christian population of Denmark and its Muslim minority.