Al-Qa’eda’s Reward for Swedish Cartoonist
BBC: The purported head of al-Qaeda in Iraq has offered a reward for the murder of a Swedish cartoonist over his drawing depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

The $100,000 (£49,310) reward would be raised by 50% if Lars Vilks was "slaughtered like a lamb" said the audio message aired on the internet.

The speaker, said to be Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, threatened a new offensive during the holy month of Ramadan.

Last month's cartoon showed Prophet Muhammad's head on a dog's body. Bounty set over Prophet cartoon (more) »

Mark Alexander

Flemming Rose on Free Speech and Radical Islam
Mr. Rose is the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten. He is writing a book about the challenges to free speech in a globalized world.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL - Opinion: At a lunch last year celebrating his 25th anniversary with Jyllands-Posten, Kurt Westergaard told an anecdote. During World War II Pablo Picasso met a German officer in southern France, and they got into a conversation. When the German officer figured out whom he was talking to he said:

"Oh, you are the one who created Guernica?" referring to the famous painting of the German bombing of a Basque town by that name in 1937.

Picasso paused for a second, and replied, "No, it wasn't me, it was you."

For the past three months Mr. Westergaard and his wife have been on the run. Mr. Westergaard did the most famous of the 12 Muhammad cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 -- the one depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban. The cartoon was a satirical comment on the fact that some Muslims are committing terrorist acts in the name of Islam and the prophet. Tragically, Mr. Westergaard's fate has proven the point of his cartoon: In the early hours of Tuesday morning Danish police arrested three men who allegedly had been plotting to kill him.

In the past few days 17 Danish newspapers have published Mr. Westergaard's cartoon, which is as truthful as Picasso's painting. My colleagues at Jyllands-Posten and I understand that the cartoon may be offensive to some people, but sometimes the truth can be very offensive. As George Orwell put it in the suppressed preface to "Animal Farm": "If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Sadly, the plot to kill Mr. Westergaard is not an isolated story, but part of a broader trend that risks undermining free speech in Europe and around the world. Consider the following recent events: In Oslo a gallery has censored three small watercolor paintings, showing the head of the prophet Muhammad on a dog's body, by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has been under police protection since the fall of 2007. In Holland the municipal museum in The Hague recently refused to show photos by the Iranian-born artist Sooreh Hera of gay men wearing the masks of the prophet Muhammad and his son Ali; Ms. Hera has received several death threats and is in hiding. In Belarus an editor has been sentenced to three years in a forced labor camp after republishing some of Jyllands-Posten's Muhammad cartoons. In Egypt bloggers are in jail after having "insulted Islam." In Afghanistan the 23-year-old Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death because he distributed "blasphemous" material about the mistreatment of women in Islam. And in India the Bengal writer Taslima Nasreen is in a safe house after having been threatened by people who don't like her books. Every one of the above cases speaks to the same problem >>> By Flemming Rose

LETTERS TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APROPOS OF THIS ARTICLE:
Do You Have a Right to Avoid What You Don't Want to Hear?

Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)

Still More Cartoon Protests Annoy Muslims!
THE TELEGRAPH: Fears grew of a new confrontation over images deemed blasphemous by Muslims as Pakistan joined Iran in protest over a sketch by a Swedish artist portraying the prophet Mohammed as a dog.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said it had summoned the Swedish charge d'affaires to condemn "in the strongest terms, the publication of an offensive and blasphemous sketch of the Holy Prophet".

The move adds to a chorus of criticism over the series of drawings, by artist Lars Vilks, one of which was published earlier this month by a regional Swedish newspaper.

The drawings show the head of a turbaned man attached to the body of a dog, in front of various settings including a football goal.

The publication, in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, came after several galleries had refused to display the drawings, apparently for fear of violent retaliation from offended Muslims.

Early last year, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the Muslim world after the publication in Denmark of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed which were also deemed blasphemous.

"Alongside the picture, we published a comment piece saying that it was serious that there is self-censorship among exhibition [galleries]," said the Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief, Ulf Johansson.
Last weekend, a small gathering of protestors gathered outside the newspaper's offices to demonstrate against the cartoon's publication. New Muslim cartoon protests grow (more)

BBC:
Sweden 'regrets' Prophet cartoon

Mark Alexander

Jews Face Renewed Doubt Over Their Future in Europe

People lay flowers outside a synagogue where an attack took
place in Copenhagen, Feb. 15, 2015.

TIME: Denmark's synagogue attack is the latest in a series across Europe

Denmark will do everything it can to protect Jews, said its Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt to reporters Monday. But across town, the thousands of bouquets that had been laid at the gates of a synagogue where a gunman killed a Jewish man at the weekend were a painful reminder that they hadn’t been protected enough. Here and across Europe, the attack added to a growing fear among Jews that the continent was once again not safe for them.

About 80 people were celebrating a bar mitzvah at the synagogue on the central Copenhagen street of Krystalgade in the early hours of Feb. 15 when Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussain shot and killed synagogue member Dan Uzan, who was guarding the entrance to the building. Earlier El-Hussain had killed one and injured three at a meeting on freedom of expression organized by Lars Vilks, a cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Mohammed as a dog.

Coming so soon after a similar attack in Paris, in which two gunmen killed cartoonists and editors at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, while another killed five in two other incidents, the Copenhagen events have sharply undermined the small Danish Jewish community’s already deteriorating sense of security.

“It’s terrifying,” says Marianne Isaksen, a member of the congregation where Dan Uzan was killed. She and her husband Alf, both in their 70s, knew Uzan, and had come out to Krystalgade to commiserate with other synagogue members and pay their respects. “We knew things were getting worse, but we never thought it could happen here.” » | Lisa Abend | Copenhagen | Monday, February 16, 2015

Charlie Hebdo Attack: 'Who Dares to Publish Anything after This?' – Cartoonist Lars Vilks

Still More Cartoon Protests from Muslims!
THE TELEGRAPH: Fears grew of a new confrontation over images deemed blasphemous by Muslims as Pakistan joined Iran in protest over a sketch by a Swedish artist portraying the prophet Mohammed as a dog.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said it had summoned the Swedish charge d'affaires to condemn "in the strongest terms, the publication of an offensive and blasphemous sketch of the Holy Prophet".

The move adds to a chorus of criticism over the series of drawings, by artist Lars Vilks, one of which was published earlier this month by a regional Swedish newspaper.

The drawings show the head of a turbaned man attached to the body of a dog, in front of various settings including a football goal.

The publication, in the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, came after several galleries had refused to display the drawings, apparently for fear of violent retaliation from offended Muslims.

Early last year, violent demonstrations erupted throughout the Muslim world after the publication in Denmark of 112 cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed which were also deemed blasphemous.

"Alongside the picture, we published a comment piece saying that it was serious that there is self-censorship among exhibition [galleries]," said the Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief, Ulf Johansson.

Last weekend, a small gathering of protestors gathered outside the newspaper's offices to demonstrate against the cartoon's publication. New Muslim cartoon protests grow (more)

Mark Alexander

“To Offend Religion Is Possible in a Democratic Society”

RUSSIA TODAY: “To offend religion is possible in a democratic society”: Why there should be an exception for just one religion, Islam, not to create cartoons about it when all the other major religions accept this, is the problem bothering Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. >>> | Monday, May 24, 2010

RUSSIA TODAY: Drawing attention to Mohammed: Five years after a Danish paper was fiercely criticized by Muslims for depicting the Prophet Mohammed in derogatory cartoons, Facebook and YouTube are under fire from Pakistan. >>> | Published Friday, May 21, 2010; Edited Monday, May 24, 2010