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The Repentant Radical
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/17/ahmed-akkari-repents-violent-opposition-to-danish-cartoons-lampooning-islam.htmlAn interesting "where are they now?" story...
(My favorite cartoon is still the one of the school-aged boy writing in Arabic on a chalkboard, "The editors of Jyllands-Posten are reactionary provocateurs".)
In 2005 Akkari was a baby-faced religious leader, the pious but integrated immigrant called upon by the Danish media to explain Muslim discontent with the West. Danish historian Jytte Klausen found that between 1999 and October 2007, Jyllands-Posten, the country’s largest circulating daily, “published nearly 300 stories featuring Akkari.”
Many of those citations would come after September 2005, when Jyllands-Posten published 12 satirical drawings of the Prophet Muhammad—some respectful, some mocking Islam, some mocking the newspaper for soliciting them—that precipitated what is known in Denmark as “the cartoon crisis.” Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the illustrations, would later write that publication of the caricatures was “prompted by my perception of prevalent self-censorship among the Danish media,” a fear that the Islamic proscription on images of the prophet were encroaching on the country’s free-speech traditions. Most of the drawings have long since been forgotten. But it was a cartoon by artist Kurt Westergaard depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban that would provoke a violent global crisis.
...
As the death toll climbed, Akkari denied responsibility for the violence, arguing that it was "the cartoon from Jyllands-Posten that made people so angry—and nothing else.” In private, he fantasized about meting out violent punishment to his enemies. A French documentary crew secretly recorded Akkari threatening Naser Khader, a Syrian-born Danish politician and outspoken opponent of Islamism. The possibility of Khader achieving a high-level ministerial post in the Danish government prompted Akkari to comment that, if such a scenario came to pass, “shouldn't someone dispatch two guys to blow up him and his ministry?” Denmark’s deputy prime minister, Bendt Bendtsen, said that Akkari, who once begged to remain in Denmark, should be deported back to Lebanon.
As the cartoon crisis simmered, Akkari receded into the background. In 2008, after a rift with Laban, he disappeared to the empty expanse of Greenland. Five years later, his photo sits on a hillside in Syria next to Naser Khader’s and Kurt Westergaard’s, torn apart by bullets from a Kalashnikov. How did this leading figure from Denmark’s Islamist milieu, a selfless and tireless defender of the prophet, end up being denounced on the Syrian battlefield as an apostate?
Many of those citations would come after September 2005, when Jyllands-Posten published 12 satirical drawings of the Prophet Muhammad—some respectful, some mocking Islam, some mocking the newspaper for soliciting them—that precipitated what is known in Denmark as “the cartoon crisis.” Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the illustrations, would later write that publication of the caricatures was “prompted by my perception of prevalent self-censorship among the Danish media,” a fear that the Islamic proscription on images of the prophet were encroaching on the country’s free-speech traditions. Most of the drawings have long since been forgotten. But it was a cartoon by artist Kurt Westergaard depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban that would provoke a violent global crisis.
...
As the death toll climbed, Akkari denied responsibility for the violence, arguing that it was "the cartoon from Jyllands-Posten that made people so angry—and nothing else.” In private, he fantasized about meting out violent punishment to his enemies. A French documentary crew secretly recorded Akkari threatening Naser Khader, a Syrian-born Danish politician and outspoken opponent of Islamism. The possibility of Khader achieving a high-level ministerial post in the Danish government prompted Akkari to comment that, if such a scenario came to pass, “shouldn't someone dispatch two guys to blow up him and his ministry?” Denmark’s deputy prime minister, Bendt Bendtsen, said that Akkari, who once begged to remain in Denmark, should be deported back to Lebanon.
As the cartoon crisis simmered, Akkari receded into the background. In 2008, after a rift with Laban, he disappeared to the empty expanse of Greenland. Five years later, his photo sits on a hillside in Syria next to Naser Khader’s and Kurt Westergaard’s, torn apart by bullets from a Kalashnikov. How did this leading figure from Denmark’s Islamist milieu, a selfless and tireless defender of the prophet, end up being denounced on the Syrian battlefield as an apostate?
