What Would Mohammed Drive?
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The secretary general of the Muslim World League is demanding that Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Doug Marlette apologize to each and every one of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, for a cartoon titled “What Would Mohammed Drive?” that implies a connection between Islam and violence.
Or they’ll kill him.
Abdullah Al-Turki, secretary general of the Muslim World League, has demanded the Tallahassee Democrat apologize to the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims and promise not to publish such material again.
“Some enemies of Islam have been trying to tarnish the image of Muhammad just as they publish misleading information about and wrong interpretation of the Holy Quran,” said Turki, according to the Saudi publication Arab News. …
In a phone interview, Marlette told WorldNetDaily he would not apologize, though he has received more than 4,500 e-mails from angry Muslims, with some threats of death and mutilation. …
Muslims consider depictions of their prophet to be blasphemous, but Marlette told WND he did not have Muhammad in mind when he drew the picture of the truck driver, but rather a “generic” Arab headdress-wearing man.
Noting that cartoon images should not be taken literally, he pointed out that “there were no Ryder trucks in Muhammad’s time.”
Similary, he said, “I could have drawn a cartoon of ‘What would Jesus drive?’ with some Pentecostal guy driving an SUV.”
‘How would you have drawn it?’
Marlette said the cartoon prompted a “firestorm of reaction” from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which reprinted it and organized an e-mail campaign.
The e-mails all said essentially the same thing about him and his drawing, he said. The Muslim writers used terms such as “blasphemy,” “ignorant,” “bigoted,” “hateful” and “donkey.”