Cartoonist Signe Wilkinson: Muslims Should Protest With Their Own Cartoons

By: E&P Staff Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Signe Wilkinson has a suggestion for people angry over the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

"Instead of threatening to draw blood, Muslims should pick up their pens and draw return cartoons instead," The Philadelphia Daily News/Washington Post Writers Group creator said in a Monday column on Beliefnet.com.

Wilkinson began the column: "As someone who has been picketed and protested for her blasphemous, insensitive, anti-Islamic cartoons, I have nothing but sympathy for my Danish colleagues who have incurred the wrath of the godly by publishing a portfolio of cartoons making fun of one of the world's great -- but apparently humor-impaired -- religions. However, I also have compassion for the members of humor-impaired religions. After all, I am a Quaker."

She went on to note that, "most groups are humor-impaired when outsiders make fun of them," although most of the ensuing protests -- while "loud" and "sometimes intimidating" -- are "generally peaceful."

Wilkinson continued: "I don't go out of my way to poke fun at the religiously faithful." She said cartoonists "generally try to avoid negatively caricaturing any group JUST to make fun of them. American history is filled with examples of published images that would not run in newspapers today, our most egregious sin being the racist portrayals (without comment) of black Americans ... ."

Early in her career, Wilkinson recalled being told that, "all Arabs aren't head-scarf-wearing sheikhs" -- as many cartoons depicted them. She added: "Of course, sheikhs get to choose what they wear. Many women in Islamic societies don't. My encounters with Muslims have mostly come over cartoons protesting the treatment of Muslim women. After one such cartoon, a local woman called me to defend the headscarf. I said I had no problem with anyone freely wearing a headscarf or any other religious outfit. I then asked her, 'But you wouldn't force OTHER women to wear a headscarf, would you?' After a pause she replied, 'Well, if it was for her own good.'

"So there you have the reason I go to the drawing board every day. I am drawing to help prevent a world where someone else decides what I must wear for my own good. And, I'm willing to risk being called anti-Muslim to do it. I'm guessing the Danish cartoonists were trying to do the same thing. The cartoons were criticizing violence and suicide bombing in the name of Islam. ..."

And Wilkinson wrote: "If the reaction of the 'Arab street' continues to be violence whenever they don't like something they see in someone else's newspaper, then I predict more such cartoons are on the way."