Seattle Cartoonist Goes into Hiding in Response to Muslim Fatwa

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day cartoon

Back on April 20th, when producers censored a portion of a South Park episode featuring the prophet Mohammed following Muslim threats, Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris responded by publishing the above cartoon on her (now vanished) website and declaring May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”

Norris’s comment struck a chord with bloggers and was widely reported, but all the attention she attracted made the cartoonist uneasy. Only a few days later, April 26, Norris was backing off and trying to distance herself from the whole affair.

Crawfishing, of course, did her no good at all, and in June,
Anwar al-Awlaki, our own home-grown jihadi cleric, now broadcasting agitprop and threats on the Internet out of Yemen, placed Molly Norris on a hit list including 8 others guilty of blasphemous caricatures of the prophet as a “prime target” whose “proper abode is hellfire.”

Now Seattle Weekly reports that Norris has gone into hiding.

[Molly Norris], on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI,.. is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

Personally, I think she should just move to red state America where everybody has guns.