“Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour”.

That was how it began seven years ago. Everyone Draw Mohammed Day had spread over the internet. And with it came the death threats. Molly Norris, who got it all started, soon had to go into hiding.

 

The South African cartoonist Zapiro decided to draw Mohammed on a psychiatrist’s couch. “Other prophets have followers with a sense of humour,” Mohammed complains. A newspaper on a coffee table in the clouds carries headlines about Everyone Draw Mohammed Day and Jihadist fatwas.

 

Jonathan Shapiro, the leftist cartoonist behind Zapiro, quickly found out that Mohammed’s followers really don’t have a sense of humor. Threats such as “You’ve got to watch your back” and “This will cost him his life” came pouring in.

 

Shapiro met with Muslim leaders and tried to establish his bona fides. He hated Israel and the “Islamophobia of the US War on Terror”. Not to mention European Burka bans and the “juvenile Islamophobic Facebook campaign”. He wasn’t one of those wicked Islamophobes. He was a good lefty.

 

“In South Africa, here Muslims are empowered,” Shapiro complained to the same imaginary psychiatrist in another comic strip  “Muslim clerics told me this week they’re all for Freedom of Expression… except for drawing the prophet. Making exceptions for Religious Censorship is hard for a cartoonist.”

 

Shapiro had missed the point. In Islam, religion is politics and politics is religion. Supporting Islamic empowerment means endorsing theocratic censorship. To mock Mohammed is to undermine the supremacist foundations of Islamist theocracy. And that challenges Islamic power.

 

More here.