At Agora, a translation of an editorial at Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper, on the Danish dairy firm Arla and their deals with Arab countries: We wouldn’t take your money if you paid us to do so!

EDITORIAL: No “support”, Please

FOOD FAIR in Dubai: A man with a tight smile announces that Arla in no way “supports” any cartoons in Jyllands-Posten.

What cartoons in Jyllands-Posten have to do with a food fair in Dubai can only be explained by the gallopping lunacy of the times, but for now that is not our focus.

A different kind of weird is: what does the man mean by “support”? The statement, coming as it does from Arla, can only be about money. The matter at hand, we must deduce, is that Arla was thinking of sending us a check made out to some amount, but has now decided not to.

Thank you. To be blunt, it would be deeply insulting for us to receive any such “support” from Arla. We still have to consider our dignity.

And that is not for sale. We do not crawl for oriental dictators and we wouldn’t dream of boycotting the democratic state of Israel in order to please some bloodthirsty dictatorship out of medieval times.

But Arla has no such scruples. It is more profitable to kowtow to dictatorships than to stand up for democracy.

Danish history has seen other examples of grubbing merchants who haven’t let democratic principles or even ordinary decency stand in the way of profits.

While the man from Arla is in Dubai talking about his lack of “support” for the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten, the thugs of the dictators are busy desecrating national symbols and burning down embassies.

Arla doesn’t seem to mind.

Known madmen invade our TV sets, shrilly promising slavery to Danes, demanding that the Danish cartoonists be handed over to suffer torture and eventual death.

Arla becomes silent.

Moslems act as madmen over a cartoonist who - to their astonishment - portrayed the prophet with a bomb in his turban. Certainly not the most unnatural thought, considering the deeds that have been done in his name.

Arla is silent.

Plundering hordes scream that Islam is the Religion of Peace. Some of us say they have a funny way of showing it.

Arla stays silent.

We wouldn’t be as primitive as to suggest that Arla be boycotted.

But we are astonished.