‘Draw Muhammad’ cartoonist goes in hiding

NASHVILLE — Molly Norris, the editorial cartoonist who suffered a significant backlash to her “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon, has gone into hiding. “The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity,” the Seattle Weekly announced in September. Norris basically is being placed in a witness protection program without financial support from the government, the newspaper said, after an American jihadist in Yemen issued a fatwa calling for her assassination. A columnist for WORLD magazine said the jihadists have invaded the United States and taken the life of one of its citizens, all from beyond America’s shores.

“Norris is still alive, but the woman as she was known is gone,” D.C. Innes wrote Sept. 22. “She has lost her life in the legal sense: new birth certificate, school records, life story. For anyone who knew her, it is as though she is dead. But it is not just one life the jihadists have taken. To the former Molly Norris, it is as though all the people she has known are also now dead. They have been torn from her life because she has been torn from theirs.” Norris intended the cartoon to protest radical Muslims violently stifling freedom of speech and conscience, and The Washington Examiner noted in an editorial Sept. 20 that her plight has drawn less attention than the pastor in Florida who threatened to burn the Quran. “Freedom of speech and press are in deep trouble when the American government thinks the best it can do to protect a journalist from death threats is to counsel her to go into hiding, and when the elite voices of American journalism can’t be bothered to say anything in her defense,” The Examiner said. “But it’s actually worse than that. The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof thinks Muslims are owed an apology.”