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Kurt Westergaard Mohammed Cartoon

January 2, 2010 by · Comments Off on Kurt Westergaard Mohammed Cartoon 

Kurt-Westergaard-Mohammed-Cartoon-300x171Kurt Westergaard Mohammed Cartoon:The Kurt Westergaard Mohammed cartoon nearly cost the 74-year-old Danish cartoonist his life. An unnamed suspect, described by authorities as 28-year-old Somalian, with ties to al-Qaida, entered Westergaard’s house at 10PM local time last night (4 PM EST), but was stopped and shot by Danish police.

The suspect, shot in the leg and hand, was charged with the attempted assassination of Kurt Westergaard and a police officer on duty, the intelligence service said. He was allegedly armed with an ax and a knife. The judge ordered the suspect held for four weeks while the investigation proceeds.

This is not the first attempt on Kurt Westergaard’s life since the Kurt Westergaard Mohammed cartoon was published on Sept. 30, 2005. This cartoon was the most contentious of the 12 Jyllands-Posten Mohammad cartoons, all published in the paper on one page that day.

You can see the Kurt Westergaard Mohammed cartoon above. The full page of Jyllands-Posten cartoons are also shown. Both were obtained from Wikipedia Commons.

In 2005, the cartoonist said he wanted the Kurt Westergaard Mohammed cartoon to show how some people exploit the prophet to legitimize acts of terror. However, many in the Muslim world interpreted the drawing as depictingMohammed as a terrorist.

While the Kurt Westergaard Mohammed cartoon reportedly shows the prophet in a bad light, it should be noted that modern Islamic law states that the depiction of the prophet in any image is unlawful. For example, Wikipedia itself has faced contentious battles over images of the prophet in articles on the site.

Reports are that Kurt Westergaard, 74, along with his visiting 5-year-old granddaughter, hid in a panic room until authorities arrived. The 28-year-old man with ties to the al-Qaida group al-Shabab broke a window and entered Kurt Westergaard’s home in Aarhus on Friday night armed with an ax and a knife.

Since the publication of the Kurt Westergaard Mohammed cartoon, Danish authorities have arrested several other suspects who plotted against Westergaard’s life. Three such arrests were made in February of 2008, after which the cartoonist said, “Of course I fear for my life after the Danish Security and Intelligence Service informed me of the concrete plans of certain people to kill me. However, I have turned fear into anger and indignation. It has made me angry that a perfectly normal everyday activity which I used to do by the thousand was abused to set off such madness.

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