In Attack on Texas Muhammad Cartoon Event, Echoes of ‘Charlie Hebdo’
Two gunmen were killed in an attack on a cartoon contest to draw the prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas, onSunday night—an incident and event invoking both January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks and the anti-Muslim cartoons from Europe that sparked the controversy over Hebdo.
The gunmen reportedly drove up to the event, “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,” some time before 7 p.m. at the Curtis Culwell Center, a public event space run by the local school district. The two men opened fire, wounding an unarmed security guard in the ankle, before being shot and killed by police, who were nearby providing security.
The Associated Press reports that the bomb squad was called in to search the gunmen’s bodies and their car for explosives. “Because of the situation of what was going on today and the history of what we’ve been told has happened at other events like this, we are considering their car [is] possibly containing a bomb,” Joe Harn, a spokesman for the Garland Police Department, said at a news conference.
The gunmen have not yet been identified, and police say there were no credible threats made ahead of the event.
The attack has already stirred comparisons to the deadly attack in Paris on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in which brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi killed 12 people, including several of the magazine’s cartoonists, over its frequent depictions of the prophet Muhammad.
Indeed, yesterday’s event was a direct response to one held on the same site in late January called “Stand With the Prophet.” The Dallas Morning News reports that the January event spurred the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a group led by prominent anti-Islam activist Pam Geller, to organize the cartoon contest at the same location. The AFDI is considered an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist and hate organizations.
The event was attended by Geller, who described it as an exercise of free speech, as well as prominent far-right politician Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party. Wilders reportedly gave the keynote speech, in which he similarly depicted anti-Muhammad imagery as a matter of free speech. “Muhammad fought and terrorized people with the swords. Today, here in Garland, we fight Muhammad and his followers with the pen. And the pen, the drawings, will prove mightier than the sword,” he said.
But as The Christian Science Monitor reported during the aftermath of the Hebdo attacks, the Muhammad cartoon controversies over the past decade or so were not simply exercises of free speech but were also deeply rooted in anti-Islamic sentiment. They first peaked in Denmark and were given loudest voice by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which routinely railed against Islam and its adherents.
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Original article from TakePart
