Swedish Media and Prime Minister rally around cartoonist threatened by Muslims

The Swedish media and the Prime Minister rallied Sunday behind a cartoonist whose depiction of the Islamic prophet as a dog earned him death threats from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, as Swedish companies braced for a backlash.

Cartoonist Lars Vilks said he was ready to die after extremists in Iraq offered $150,000 to anyone who slit his throat or $100,000 for his murder by other means.

“We must not give in,” he was quoted as saying in the Dagens Nyheter daily which republished the cartoon in small format on Sunday.

“I’m starting to grow old. I could die at any time – it’s not a catastrophe,” he said.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Sunday sought to defuse tensions and urged “reflection” after talks with local Islamic leaders.

What Muslims Should Be Outraged Over:

Our view: Europeans – and indeed free people everywhere – should stand up against the Islamic oppression. Europe is not Islamic, and Europe should not sacrifice its culture to a people who – in the name of Islam – use any and every opportunity to stage violent protests, issue death threaths, destroy property, murder, and commit other acts of terrorism.

“We are appealing for calm, we are appealing for reflection, we reject these calls to violence and we reject any attempts to aggravate the situation,” the Moderate Party leader told the domestic TT news agency.

He underscored Sweden’s commitment to freedom of speech and expression, echoing the local media on Sunday.

The group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, otherwise known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, also put $50,000 dollars on the head of Ulf Johansson, editor in chief of the Nerikes Allehanda newspaper which published the caricature.

Swedish media condemned the threats, issued through the internet on Saturday in the form of a statement in the name of the group’s purported leader, Sheikh Abu Omar al-Baghdadi.

“We live in a country where freedom of expression is not dictated by fundamentalists, nor by governments,” wrote Dagens Nyheter chief editor Thorbjörn Larsson in an editorial.

“Dagens Nyheter has already published the cartoon. To me, publishing it was the obvious thing to do.”

The cartoon featuring the Prophet Mohammed’s head on a dog’s body was originally published in Nerikes Allehanda on August 18th and immediately provoked protests by Muslims in the western town of Örebro, where the paper is based.