The Swedish media rallied on Sunday behind a cartoonist who drew a blasphemous cartoon of the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him), which earned him death threats from Al Qaeda in Iraq, as Swedish companies braced for a backlash.Cartoonist Lars Vilks said he was ready to die after extremists in Iraq offered $150,000 to anyone who slit his throat or $100,000 for his murder by other means. “We must not give in,” he was quoted as saying in the Dagens Nyheter daily which republished the blasphemous cartoon in small format on Sunday. “I’m starting to grow old. I could die at any time – it’s not a catastrophe,” he said.
The group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, otherwise known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, also put $50,000 on the head of Ulf Johansson, editor in chief of the Nerikes Allehanda newspaper which published the blasphemous cartoon. Swedish media condemned the threats, issued through the Internet on Saturday in the form of a statement in the name of the group’s purported leader, Sheikh Abu Omar Al-Baghdadi. “We live in a country where freedom of expression is not dictated by fundamentalists, nor by governments,” wrote Dagens Nyheter chief editor Thorbjorn Larsson in an editorial. “Dagens Nyheter has already published the cartoon. To me, publishing it was the obvious thing to do.”