Anti-Islam group wants to run cartoon ads of Mohammed in DC
The anti-Islam American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) is planning to run an advertising campaign in Washington, DC featuring the cartoon that won the controversial Prophet Mohammed drawing contest in Texas earlier this month.
Critics called the exhibition and contest a provocation. Two gunmen attacked the event and injured an officer, but officers at the scene killed the gunmen before anyone else was injured.
Blogger Pamela Geller, president of AFDI, said the new ad campaign is meant to defend the freedom of speech and stand up to violent intimidation. AFDI is a self-proclaimed human rights group which has been accused of being an anti-Islam hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The ad campaign will feature the winning cartoon by Bosch Fawstin.
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“Because the media and the cultural and political elites continue to self-enforce the Sharia without the consent of the American people by refusing to show any depictions of [Mohammed] or showing what it was in Texas that had jihadists opening fire, we are running an ad featuring the winning cartoon,” Geller’s organization said in a statement.
The winning cartoon, which earned Fawstin $12,500, depicts a man in a turban – presumably Mohammed – staring out at the viewer and brandishing a sword saying, “You can’t draw me!” The viewer, the cartoonist, is shown with a hand drawing the picture of Mohammed and writing, “That’s why I draw you.”
The ad campaign has been submitted to the Washington, DC Metro Transit Authority so that it can run on buses and at the Foggy Bottom, Capitol South, Bethesda, L’Enfant Plaza and Shady Grove Metro stations.
Officials from the MTA did not respond to a request for comment about the proposal, reportedBreitbart.
READ MORE: 'They were there to shoot people' - Texas police on cartoon exhibition attack
Earlier this year, the AFDI won multiple federal court cases, under freedom of speech rights sanctioned by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, to force transportation authorities in Philadelphia and New York to run ads that claimed Islam promotes discrimination and the killing of Jews.
In an interview on CBS Philadelphia radio, Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, Geller said there is nothing about the cartoon that incites violence and it is clearly within the established American tradition of satire.
“If America surrenders on this point, freedom of speech is a relic of history, and if we give up on this, then they will have more demands: what we eat (pork), what we drink (alcohol). …we cannot submit to the assassin’s veto,” she said. “Do people really think that this is where it ends? ‘Just don’t let the cartooning and we will be saved.’ Are you kidding?”
