How to Make Europe A Safe Place For Cartoonists Once More

thanks to the folks at Brussels Journal for this gem!!!

and thanks to TheReligionofPeace, for finding it!!

How to Make Europe A Safe Place For Cartoonists Once More

From the desk of Thomas Landen on Sat, 2010-01-02 14:33

“The older you get, the less you have to lose.” That is the answer which the 74 year old Kurt Westergaard gives when you ask him how afraid he is of being assassinated. Since he drew a cartoon of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban, in 2005, he has been living under constant death threats from Muslims. The Danish state security and secret services, the PET, have watched over Kurt and his wife Gitte ever since. “My pets take good care of me,” he says. Kurt needs it. Regularly plots to murder him are uncovered. In 2008 the PET arrested two Tunisians who were planning to force their way into the Westergaard home and assassinate the cartoonist. Yesterday evening, the Danish police shot a Somali man who had forced his way into Kurt’s home with an axe.

The Danish authorities made Kurt and Gitte live in ten different safe houses, before they converted his house – a modest 1970s bungalow in a middle-class suburb of Denmark’s second largest city, Arhus – into a fortress with surveillance cameras, steel doors, bulletproof windows and a panic room. The latter is located in the bathroom. It is equipped with a button which Kurt can use to alarm “his pets.” Yesterday, the steel door and the panic room with alarm button proved how necessary they are. When the Somali, who had forced his way into the house by smashing a window, was trying to axe his way into the panic room, Kurt alarmed the police, who arrived a few minutes later and shot the intruder.

No doubt, the incident was very upsetting for Kurt and Gitte. Their 5-year old granddaughter had been staying with them and sought refuge in the panic room too. The girl still has her whole life ahead of her and, consequently, has a lot to lose.

Kurt, invariably dressed in “the colours of anarchism” – red trousers, a black shirt, red scarf and, when he goes out, a black Stetson – dotes on his grandchildren. One of them is severely handicapped and his grandparents spend a lot of time looking after the boy in his wheelchair.

As a cartoonist Kurt always tries to see the bright and funny side of life. “When I wake up in the morning, I tell my wife ‘May the secret service be with you today,’” is one of the jokes he likes to make. Gitte, however, does not think it is funny, and neither does Kurt when he considers that the secret service also has to look after the safety of his grandchildren, just because he has become “the most hated man in Mecca.” It is a question we all have to ask ourselves: What kind of a place has Europe become when cartoonists need to worry about the lives of their grandchildren?

Two years ago, Gitte was fired from the kindergarten where she used to work. Kurt’s wife was sacked because several parents expressed concern for the safety of their kids. Being a parent, it is easy to understand the worries of the parents of the children Gitte cared for. But what kind of a place has Europe become when family members of a cartoonist lose their jobs because of a drawing?

Kurt says he will never apologize for drawing the Islamic prophet with a bomb in his turban, nor does he regret having made it. “My cartoon,” he says, “was an attempt to expose those fanatics who have justified a great number of bombings, murders and other atrocities with reference to the sayings of their prophet. If many Muslims thought that their religion did not condone such acts, they might have stood up and declared that the men of violence had misrepresented the true meaning of Islam. Very few of them did so.”

Many Europeans are worried about the growing presence of Muslims in their countries for exactly this reason: the absence of widespread indignation in the Muslim community about the atrocities that some commit in the name of Islam. If these people were to react in the same way as the parents who had Gitte Westergaard removed from the kindergarten, namely by insisting on the removal of Muslims from their neighbourhoods, they would be branded as “racists” and “islamophobes.” The question who is responsible for this insecurity and how to remove them from our midst, is the question which urgently needs to be asked if Europe is to become a safe place again for cartoonists, their families and for all of us.