The government that protects him decided that moving the man from one safe house to another was less cost effective than simply equipping his home with high-tech surveillance cameras, steel doors, bulletproof windows and a panic room. No, he’s not a Justice Department witness against the mob or an American diplomat living in Baghdad’s Green Zone. He’s a cartoonist named Kurt Westegaard. You might remember his now famous (or infamous) drawing of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb for a turban. The cartoon sparked riots across the Muslim world, resulting in over 130 deaths – mostly Muslims.
In a surreal moment back in 2008, Taliban spokeman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi told journalists that Danish troops in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province were “primary targets” for his knuckle-dragging gunmen. Nothing better underscored the child-like nature of the Taliban than that they believed NATO troops already engaged in a fierce shooting war would be especially traumatized at the prospect of dying deathlier deaths.
74-year-old Cartoonist Westegaard is not in the least bit apologetic. “I don’t regret anything,” he told Canada’s National Post. “I would do it again. I have one advantage — I am an old man. There is not so much at stake for me anymore. I have lived most of my life, so I have not so much at risk.” According to the Post, during the interview, Westegaard calmly smoked a cigarette outdoors while a friend held a framed enlargement of his Mohammed cartoon close by.
And his reason for drawing the now famous cartoon? “I attempted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from parts of Islam and with this spiritual ammunition, and with dynamite and other explosives, they kill people. I showed this in a cartoon and what happened? They want to kill me, so I think I was right.”
Recently, the artist began a speaking tour that brought him to Yale and Princeton universities. Yale University Press published a book on the Westegaard’s cartoon and its effect. It did so without including the image that sparked all the controversy. At Yale, the artist was refused permission to project his cartoon onto a screen while he delivered his remarks. Instead, Yale assured Westegaard his cartoon would be shown in a separate room “so that students who do not want to see it, do not have to see it.” The brave Yale authorities never provided the room in which to display the drawing.
According to the Brussels Journal, Yale’s Muslim chaplain Omer Bajwa claimed Westergaard’s visit was part of a plot hatched by Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders and American scholar Daniel Pipes. Wilders, as you may recall from a previous post to this blog, is also a Dutchman living under threat of death by fanatical soldiers of the “religion of peace.”
During the question and answer phase to Westegaard’s Yale visit, a student – proving how successful today’s universities are at transmitting cowardly nihilism – told the artist, “You feel unsafe today, which is unfortunate, but you should realize that your presence here today has made thousands of other people feel unsafe.” This student’s parents can be proud knowing the $50,000 tuition they paid Yale closed their child’s mind to the obvious: that Islamic fanatics who murder women and children, writers, musicians, politicians, artists, Jews and anyone else who refuses to conform to their narrow, barbaric and primitive worldview — pose a far greater threat to our otherwise tranquil lives than do cartoonists.
The thousands of American’s who died on and since 9/11 make it difficult to step back and see the profound absurdity of an enemy our crumbling Western World fears and seeks to accommodate. The violent reaction by deranged Islam to Westegaard’s cartoon is tantamount to maddened mallards threatening the life of Daffy Duck’s creator Chuck Jones. With several plots to kill Westegaard foiled, the continuing fervor to murder the cartoonist proves what daffy and odd ducks jihadists truly are.
– Mr. Curmudgeon
