For sale: One Mohammed Cartoon – ‘a great cultural icon of the 21st century’

KURT Westergaard, the 72-year-old cartoonist living under the threat of death from Muslim fanatics, has announced his intention to sell his original bomb-in-a-turban drawing of the Prophet Mohammed.

The most famous of the 12 Motoons, published three years ago by Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper he works for, was described at the weekend by Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the Jyllands-Posten, as “a great cultural icon of the 21st century.”

And he said it was only fair for Westergaard to make money out of it.

According to a report yesterday in the Sunday Times, the small, ink cartoon, currently safely tucked away in a bank vault “could command great interest at auction. Auction houses, however, were voicing doubts about the wisdom of putting such a controversial item on sale.

Said Franck Lombrail, an auctioneer in Paris:

It’s too hot to handle. It would represent a risk for the public at the sale.

But Westergaard’s wife has come up with an interesting solution. She has proposed selling all of the Mohammed cartoons for $50,000 to ‘a rich Arabian oil sheikh’ who could then burn them in Mecca.

The cartoonists would get half of the money. The rest could be donated to needy Muslims.

We at the Freethinker think that the price should be upped to $100-million, half going to the cartoonists in reparation for the death threats and insults they have suffered, and the rest to establish clinics in strategic places to help cure people of the devastating mental illness called Islam. There would then be far fewer needy Muslims once they are helped to shake off their medieval delusions and begin engaging far more positively with the real world.