Twenty years on, Europe has embraced Islamic blasphemy codes and abandoned free speech.
On 30 September 2005, 12 cartoons appeared in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, under the headline, ‘The face of Muhammad’.
The headline was not entirely accurate. One of the cartoons made fun of the Jyllands-Posten editors for commissioning the series, while another showed Islamist suicide bombers being turned away from heaven. ‘Stop. Stop. We have run out of virgins’, ran the caption. At least Kurt Westergaard’s now infamous effort chimed with the title. He had drawn Muhammad wearing a turban containing a bomb, accompanied by the Muslim declaration of faith: ‘There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God.’ The cartoons were undoubtedly provocative, as indeed they were intended to be. They stood firmly in a long-standing, anti-clerical tradition of satire.
