Showing posts with label Kurt Westergaard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kurt Westergaard. Show all posts

Monday, April 6, 2009

Mohammed Cartoons redux



The above phrase in Arabic is “lan astaslem.”
It means “I will not surrender/I will not submit.”



These are the cartoons that got the Muslum world in a big uproar.

There is a reason we call Muslim mau-mau-ers the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Three years after the Mohammed Cartoon conflagration, the grievance-mongers are still trying to extract contrition out of the Danes and others who stood up for the West and for free speech.

Unfortunately, the ROPO bullies squeezed conciliatory remarks from Former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. He didn’t say the exact words “I’m sorry,” but he might as well have tattooed it on his forehead:

New NATO chief pledges conciliation with Muslims

Former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Monday he would pay close attention to religious sensibilities in his new role as NATO chief in comments aimed at allaying Muslim concerns at his appointment.

Turkey had threatened to veto Rasmussen’s appointment over his handling of a 2006 crisis triggered by cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad in a Danish newspaper. His comments fell short of the outright apology which Turkish officials had hoped for.

“I respect Islam as one of the world’s major religions as well as its religious symbols,” Rasmussen said during a panel discussion at an Istanbul conference aimed at building bridges between the Muslim world and the West…

…”I was deeply distressed that the cartoons were seen by many Muslims as an attempt by Denmark to mark and insult or behave disrespectively toward Islam or the Prophet Mohammad. Nothing could be further from my mind,” Rasmussen said…

…”During my tenure as the secretary general of NATO I will pay close attention to the religious and cultural sensibilities of the different communities that populate our increasingly pluralistic and globalized world,” Rasmussen said.

How about telling the thugs to start paying attention to the sensibilities of civilized people who don’t wage riots, murder people, and issue death threats over cartoons?

How about a reminder of the cultural insensitivities of the Mo mob to tolerance and free speech?
Click to read the article and comments

Danish cartoonist remains defiant

This is one of the cartoons.

The row over publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper resurfaced this week as Turkey held up the appointment of Danish prime minister as the new Nato secretary general. But as the BBC's Malcolm Brabant reports from Denmark, the impact of that 2006 controversy has never gone away for those closely involved.
Dusk was falling, the curtains were open and the house was hyggelig - a Danish word that means cosy, welcoming and enticing - with scores of candles flickering around the open-plan sitting room.
Dressed in his favourite "anarchist" colours of red and black, Kurt Westergaard sat down to a nourishing Nordic repast of black bread, plaice and prawns.
Unwinding after a day at the coalface of his profession, the bohemian grandfather with a seadog's beard and Father Christmas trousers appeared to be the epitome of Scandinavian tranquillity.
Except relaxing completely is something that this cartoonist can never afford to do.

Islamic extremists placed a $1m price on his head after he dared to mock Muslim suicide bombers by depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

For three years he was forced underground to avoid would-be assassins.
But Mr Westergaard has decided that he will hide no more.

"I am 73 years old," he says.

"Most of my life is over. I am too old to be afraid. I have complete faith in PET [the Danish Secret Service]."

Not only has he emerged from hiding but he has also gone on the offensive, contributing to a recently published Danish book. His latest cartoons are not as provocative as the Muhammad bomb but they satirise Islam and politicians who appease the mullahs.

"It is the question of freedom of speech, freedom of expression," he says.

"I think we are in a period in which this democratic value is under pressure, so it has to be defended."

Political repercussions

The re-emergence of Mr Westergaard has the potential to reinvigorate the argument over what is more important - respect for religion or absolute freedom of expression.
The furore over the cartoons, which reached a zenith three years ago with Danish embassies being burned and Danish products boycotted in Muslim countries, has subsided.

The debate has simply lain dormant and has never been resolved.

But the cartoons issue dominated last week's Nato heads of government meeting, attended by US President Barack Obama.

Turkey threatened to veto the appointment of Denmark's Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as Nato secretary general because he had refused to apologise for the cartoons.

The charm and intervention of President Obama was required to persuade Turkey to back down. [I think I just threw-up in my mouth]

As the alliance's new chief executive, one of Mr Fogh Rasmussen's prime tasks will be to try to heal the wounds between the West and the Muslim world.
Turkish newspapers say one of the key concessions obtained by President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is that Mr Fogh Rasmussen will be forced to apologise for the cartoons crisis.
According to the Danish press, one of his first acts of conciliation will be to publicly acknowledge that the 12 cartoons could have caused offence to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.

The U-turn is certain to upset a large percentage of the Danish population.

It is not widely appreciated that the explosion of worldwide Muslim anger in 2006 followed a visit to the Middle East by a delegation of Danish imams.
In a 2006 BBC Radio Four documentary called Denmark In the Eye of the Cartoon Storm, one of the imams, Ahmed Akkari, admitted to me that the delegation had carried three extra images that were even more inflammatory than the bomb in the turban.

"We took them to show that Muslims were being provoked," said Mr Akkari.

These extra pictures had apparently been produced by right-wing extremists and not by Jyllands Posten. They included drawings of Muhammad with a pig's head and the Prophet as a paedophile.

Following the imams' intervention, the lives of the 12 cartoonists changed irrevocably and they paid the same price as author Salman Rushdie.

Only Mr Westergaard has come out of hiding. The 11 others have followed Danish secret service advice and either have round-the-clock protection or maintain low profiles. One of them is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Still wary
Mr Westergaard's critics accuse him of being a right-wing "islamophobe" and of using the cartoons to bully Denmark's 250,000-strong Muslim minority.
Tim Jensen, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Southern Denmark, said: "I think it is simply pathetic.
"I don't think there is any need for that [new cartoons] right now. I think Muslims have to develop a thicker skin.
"But as long as they have not, let us deal with this in as a civilised manner as possible, let's have our dialogues."

Abdul Wahid Pedersen, a Dane who converted to Islam and now sits on the country's Muslim council, denies that his religion is trying to exert a veto on a fundamental Western freedom.
"If I insult you, I don't have the freedom of speech as my protector any longer," he says.

"It is a matter of finding this balance and we have got to find it, not only in Denmark but in the rest of Europe. If we want to keep our dialogue on the level of insult then we are bound to go down a real dirty track."

Mr Westergaard denies that he bears any hostility towards Muslims.

"But of course I have an anger against those who want to kill me," he adds.

Although special security measures have been installed at his hyggelig home, he closes the curtains, just in case an assassin is lurking.

The great irony is that the new Nato secretary general is about to effectively apologise to the Islamic world for Mr Westergaard's drawing while he, as Danish prime minister, was part of the Bush-Blair alliance which alienated Muslims by invading Iraq.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Motoonist says BBC "appeasing Muslim fanatics"

from Jihad Watch.com
April 3, 2009

Striking fear in the hearts of the BBC

The BBC? Appeasing Islamic jihadists? Naaah -- that couldn't happen! "Mohammed cartoonist accuses BBC of 'appeasing Muslim fanatics by not showing interview,'" by Paul Revoir for the Daily Mail, April 3 (thanks to all who sent this in):

The BBC has been accused of appeasement of radical Islam by the artist behind one of the infamous cartoons of Mohammed.

Kurt Westergaard claims the corporation's decision not to air a recent interview with him came because they are petrified of upsetting Muslims extremists.

Westergaard was one of the 12 cartoonists commissioned by the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005 to produce caricatures of the Muslim prophet.

Islamic tradition says no image of him should be produced or shown....

Mr Westergaard, 73, gave his first-ever English interview to BBC journalist Malcolm Brabant four weeks ago.

It had been expected to go out on BBC World, the BBC News channel, across radio services and on its website. But the corporation has kept the report under wraps amid claims it is frightened that it will 'inflame' Muslims around the world.

Mr Westergaard told the Daily Mail last night: 'I am disappointed on behalf of the freedom of speech. Every time you are afraid I think you make a step backwards. That is depressing me.'

He compared the BBC's behaviour with the way countries tried to appease Hitler before the Second World War and added: 'If you have an appeasement policy towards the radical Muslims then you are on a very wrong way and you have to
start marching backwards.'...

Uh, yeah.

Click to read the article and comments