Two Chicago men have been charged with plotting to attack a Danish cartoonist whose drawing of Muhammad sparked violence abroad and controversy at Yale.
Kurt Westergaard’s satirical image of the Muslim prophet wearing a bomb for a turban was the best-known of a dozen Muhammad cartoons published by a Danish newspaper in 2005. Months after their publication, demonstrations turned violent in parts of the Muslim world. This summer, the Yale University Press reignited debate– nonviolently — when it decided to remove the cartoons from a scholarly book about the cartoons.
Westergaard spoke at Yale in early October, surrounded by tight security, as part of a brief North American tour. It was just two days later, accordingto the Chicago Sun-Times, that federal agents arrested David Coleman Headley as he tried to board a plane for Pakistan. The government accuses Headley and another man of conspiring, through something called “The Mickey Mouse Project,” to “commit terrorist acts against overseas targets” — including Westergaard.
Addsthe New York Times:
Mr. Headley told agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that he had initially targeted a building occupied by the Danish newspaper, Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten in Copenhagen, but later proposed killing the paper’s cartoonist and cultural editor instead.
