This past week SpiegelOnline published an interview with Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist, who drew a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 (the simplistic one with the bomb placed on his head). The interview was based around the new development in the saga that the prosecutor general in Jordan has issued a subpoena against Westergaard. In the interview, he says again that the cartoon "was not aimed at Islam as a whole but aimed at the terrorists, who use part of Islam as their spiritual ammunition. You could also say that the terrorists have taken the Prophet as their hostage." The artist says that many people did not understand his intentions, but at the same time, it also was not in the interests of other groups (politicians and governments mostly) to admit that they did in fact understand the cartoon. Westergaard is 73 years old and now lives under police protection. An earlier article in SpiegelOnline looks more in depth at how his life has changed since his "cartoon would turn into a symbol of the struggle over European values of tolerance and freedom of the press." Westergaard's intentions (as spelled out in another interview) were more apparent when he took legal action against Geert Wilders for using his drawing in an anti-Qur'an movie. He said, "Wilders has an overly generalized perception of Muslims as potential terrorists" and that he did not want his cartoon taken out of its original context that aimed at fanatic terrorists.
