In 2005, Jyllands-Posten, “a self-described center-right newspaper in Denmark,” commissioned Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard to draw the Islamic Prophet Muhammad “as you see him.”
What Westergaard produced became a symbol of a global campaign for free speech, nearly cost Westergaard his life and set off riots, attacks, and a massacre in Paris, France, that left 12 Charlie Hebdo writers dead. It also exposed a fundamental truth about how certain cultures and religions view free speech, a legacy Westergaard would no doubt be proud to boast of.
The cartoons included one depicting a man in Islamic-style dress with a bomb for a turban.
Westergaard died last week, at the age of 86, in Copenhagen, after a long period of ill health, his family said. Born in Denmark, Westergaard always knew he wanted to be a cartoonist and joined Jyllands-Posten in 1983, retiring in 2010 after a remarkable career that had intense global consequences.
The cartoon was, Westergaard had said, not necessarily Muhammad, but possibly either how some Islamic terrorists see the prophet or how those who fear such terrorists see Islam in general.
Either way, the cartoon was read as an attack in the world of fundamentalist Islam, which viewed any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous, and Muslim fanatics launched attacks on Danish embassies across the Arab world in response.
The violent reprisals against the West had a long tail.
“The violence linked to the cartoons culminated in a 2015 massacre that left 12 people dead at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris, which had reprinted the cartoons in 2012,” the Times of Israel noted.
Westergaard saw the reaction as an explicit rejection of the terms of integration into the West.
“Many of the immigrants who came to Denmark, they had nothing,” he told the National Post in 2009. “We gave them everything — money, apartments, their own schools, free university, health care. In return, we asked one thing — respect for democratic values, including free speech. Do they agree? This is my simple test.”
Westergaard himself became one of the prime targets of the Islamic fundamentalist campaign of violence and lived with a target on his back until his death last week. In 2010, four years after the cartoons were first published, he was the target of a shocking attack in his home. “Westergaard had already been forced to spend a harrowing few months on the run with his wife Gitte,” the Guardian reported, when “a 28-year-old man of Somali origin forced his way into their home … wielding an axe and a knife.”
Westergaard hid in his bathroom, determined to protect his 5-year-old granddaughter, who was staying with him and his wife. At the time, the Guardian said, Westergaard was “confronted with a terrible choice: risk being killed in front of his granddaughter, or trust that the PET, Denmark’s security and intelligence service, knew what they were talking about when they had told him terrorists usually don’t harm family members but stick to their target.”
After the attack, Westergaard decided to live openly rather than on the run. His life, he said, was now dedicated to the principles of free speech, and he would move forward, in defiance and without fear.
“I do not see myself as a particularly brave man,” he said in his interview with the Guardian. “But in this situation, I got angry. It is not right that you are threatened in your own country just for doing your job. That’s an absurdity that I have actually benefited from because it grants me a certain defiance and stubbornness. I won’t stand for it. And that really reduces the fear a great deal.”
He wanted his legacy, though, to be his stand for freedom.
“I want to be remembered as the one who struck a blow for free speech,” Westergaard said, according to the Danish publication Berlingske. “But there is no doubt that there is someone who will instead remember me as the Satan who insulted the religion of a billion people.”
Emily Zanotti is the managing editor at the Daily Wire.
