What should the Danish editor of the Mohamed cartoons have thought of?
My fifth example of a cultural error of judgment is quite recent: it deals with the Danish cartoons. On September 30, 2005 the Danish business newspaper Jyllands Posten published political cartoons featuring Mohamed and Islam. An Egyptian fundamentalist imam in Copenhagen, who had got asylum in Denmark as a refugee and did not speak Danish, saw the cartoons, took offence and alarmed the Muslim world. Three months later the incident had escalated to Denmark’s worst diplomatic crisis since World War II, with embassies burnt, even Norwegian ones, several demonstrators killed, and millions of Kroner lost in missed exports to Muslim countries. The cultural error of judgment this time related to the dimension of Uncertainty Avoidance. Uncertainty Avoidance is the extent to which members of a culture feel threatened by unknown or ambiguous situations; it relates to intolerance. Danes grow up in one of the most tolerant societies in the world, with an extremely weak Uncertainty Avoidance. The
