Danish cartoonist: Dutch politician should air his anti-Quran film – de Volkskrant
Danish cartoonist: Dutch politician should air his anti-Quran film – Binnenland – de Volkskrant
In the Dutch daily newspaper Volkskrant an interview with Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard by Nanda Troost, about his predicaments after the recent death threats and the Fitna movie by Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
Read the Dutch version HERE
The english version HERE
ÅRHUS – Dutch politician Geert Wilders should definitely air his anti-Quranfilm, Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard says Monday in an exclusive interview in the Dutch newspaper ‘de Volkskrant’.
Westergaard says he does not understand Dutch politicians who say that Wilders should not air his film. ‘There is not a single politician in Denmark that would state a similar thing. That would mean political suicide for him. Every Danish politician knows you should never limit the freedom of speech.’
Westergaard does not regret his caricatures of the prophet Muhammad ‘at all’. ‘It started out as and still is a matter of freedom of speech.’ Westergaard considers starting this debate as a ‘duty’ of newspapers and cartoonists. ‘Muslims are to accept that.’
Extremist
The Danish cartoonist loathes the role of members of the Muslim elite, because they compare him to ‘an extremist like Osama bin Laden’. Westergaard: ‘After the nazis, fascists and communists there is a new totalitarian force threathening Europe, of course not Muslims as a group, but a number of extremists’.
Westergaard considers his cartoons perfectly acceptable and thinks ‘everything’ should be able to be said in democracies as Denmark and the Netherlands. If Muslims feel offended by that, they should ‘learn’ to cope with that. ‘We live in a tolerant society. This is the way we do this here.’
Shelter
Death threats have forced Westergaard to live in safe houses. He will soon be moving to a new shelter for the sixth time. He was first criticized after he had drawn a picture of the prophet Muhammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. His caricatures were recently republished by several newspapers in Denmark. Three men plotting an attack on his life were arrested mid February.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders also receives death threats from radical Muslims because of his extreme criticism on islam. The Dutch Prime minister as well as politicians from outside the Netherlands, have put pressure on Wilders in the past weeks to reconsider his plan to air his anti-Quran film in late March. Wilders has refused all requests.
More than 200 thousand people demonstrated against the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film of Wilders in the Afghan city of Jalalabad on Sunday. ‘Death to Denmark, death to the Nederlands’, the crowd shouted. In the past few weeks there have been many demonstrations against the cartoons and the film in other cities of Afghanistan and other Muslim countries.
