A Failed Hit on the Motoon Man

You have to give Al-Arabiya credit: they’ve done a good job of reporting on what happened in Denmark last night at Kurt Westergaard’s house. Readers will notice that all the essential elements of the story — as reported here last night in translation from the Danish press — are included in this article, and there are even some additional details.

Denmark Arrests Mohammed Cartoonist Attacker

Danish police said on Saturday they shot and wounded a Somali man with al-Qaeda links when he tried to break into the home of a cartoonist whose 2005 caricatures of Prophet Mohammad sparked global Muslim outrage.

The 28-year-old man, armed with a knife and axe, failed to get into Kurt Westergaard’s home in the town of Aarhus late on Friday and was shot in the leg and hand after he threw the axe at a policeman, a police spokesman said.

The man, now under arrest, had “close ties to the Somali terror organization al-Shabaab as well as to al-Qaeda leaders in East Africa,” the Danish Security and Intelligence Service PET said in a statement.

The man, who had a legal residence permit for Denmark, was also “suspected of being involved in terror-related activities in East Africa,” it said.

The security service said the man, who would be charged with attempting to kill Westergaard and the police officer, had been involved in a “terror-related network” that had long been under investigation in connection with threats to Westergaard.

“PET looks very seriously upon this case which once again confirms the terror threat directed against Denmark and the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in particular,” PET chief Jakob Scharf said in the statement.

Westergaard, 74, who depicted Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban, was not hurt in the incident, a police spokesman said.

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“I locked myself in our safe room and alerted the police. He tried to smash the entrance door with an axe, but he didn’t manage,” Westergaard told Danish news agency Ritzau.

“He used insults, I don’t remember which, but it was bad language. He spoke poor Danish and he wound up saying he’d be back,” said the badly shaken cartoonist.

He said police were investigating whether the Somali man acted alone in the attempted attack at Westergaard’s home, which is widely reported to be under tight security.

Last year, U.S. authorities arrested two men in Chicago who were suspected of planning attacks on Westergaard and his newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published the caricatures of Prophet Mohammed.

Now here comes a little editorial embellishment:

Most Muslims consider any depiction of the founder of Islam as offensive, and when other newspapers reprinted the caricatures in 2006 it triggered violence in a number of countries.

Three Danish embassies were attacked and at least 50 people were killed in rioting in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Several young Muslims have since been convicted in Denmark of planning bomb attacks, partly in protest at the cartoons.

In 2008, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said Europe would be punished for the cartoons. Denmark’s Muslim community makes up about 3 percent of the 5.5 million population.

Actually, is this really that different from the standard spin on the Motoon crisis that’s peddled by the MSM?

After all, the BBC routinely blurbs Mr. Westergaard as “Kurt Westergaard, whose cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad sparked an international row”. Not only do the mandarins of the Beeb refer to the Pedophile of Araby as “the Prophet Mohammed”, but they even use a capital “P”.

In the interests of journalistic objectivity, shouldn’t they describe him as “the illiterate desert nomad whom fundamentalist Muslim zealots believe to be their prophet”?

Or do they routinely refer to “our Saviour Jesus Christ” in their news stories?

Any examples of such theological even-handedness by the BBC would be appreciated.


Hat tip: TB.