Bosch Fawstin is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist, the creator of The Infidel series featuring his anti-jihadist superhero Pigman, and the winner of the 2015 AFDI Mohammad Cartoon Contest organized by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer which took place in Garland, Texas. Muslim fundamentalists have issues with artistic representations of the Religion of Peace’s warlord prophet, so two armed jihadists tried to disrupt that event and slaughter the participants but were killed in the attempt. Especially since then, social media attacks and death threats have become a way of life for Fawstin, whose artwork has graced many David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlets and FrontPage Mag articles (including this one).

I asked my friend and colleague Bosch recently about being targeted for his defense of free speech and about his perspective on the social justice agenda dominating the comics world.

Mark Tapson: Earlier this year Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders announced that he was organizing a “Draw Muhammad” contest similar to the Texas event which you won, to be held in his party’s offices in the Netherlands, and that you would be the judge. Quite an honor. It’s already drawing condemnation, if you’ll pardon the pun; an op-ed in The Economist, for example, argues that it should not be allowed to go forward and that legislation should be drafted against “speech which is grossly offensive, menacing or false.” How do you respond to that?

Bosch Fawstin: I think The Economist’s estimation is grossly offensive, menacing and false. Muslims have MURDERED cartoonists over cartoons. The time for anyone to be offended by cartoons – and not by those who murder over cartoons – is over, at least in reality. In the unreality that leftists and Muslims demand that we observe, cartoons cause terrorism, with some Muslims even calling cartoons themselves terrorism. This is mad, and it has to be pushed back against and mocked, and that’s partly why I continue to draw Mohammad cartoons.

MT: The Southern Poverty Law Center, the news media’s go-to source for so-called “hate groups” even though the SPLC itself is a leftist-funded smear organization, included you in an “anti-Muslim roundup” in May. The left insists on using this demonizing label “anti-Muslim” rather than anti-Islam. Can you talk about the distinction?

BF: “Anti-Muslim” is a smear which requires our own cultural values to be used against us, as our culture values people, individual human beings, unlike Islamic culture, and so to call Islam critics “anti-Muslim” is to defame them as anti-people, not as critics who are fighting evil ideas. And it works, to an extent, as the weaker among us don’t want to be associated with those who are [considered to be] against people. As for the SPLC, the first thing they did right after I survived a jihadist attack was to list me as a one-man “hate group,” and they did an interview right after the attack in which they said that they were trying to find my location, and that they had whittled it down to one area. Think about that: an American citizen almost dies in an attack by the Islamic enemy, and this American arch-hate group, SPLC, acted as if they were working with the Islamic enemy, trying to find my location (to what end?) and defaming me, while saying nothing about those who had just tried to kill me and everyone else at the Garland event.

More here.