FaithWorld

(Photo: Banner at demonstration in Kuala Lumpur against a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed March 26, 2010/Bazuki Muhammad)

A Seattle cartoonist who stirred up a religious storm with a tongue-in-cheek encouragement to draw images of the Muslim prophet Mohammed has gone into hiding after a threat to her safety.

Cartoonist Molly Norris, who published an illustration in April on her website entitled “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” was told by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to “go ghost,” according to Seattle Weekly, where Morris was a regular contributor.

“On the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI,” Norris is “moving, changing her name and essentially wiping away her identity,” a Seattle Weekly report said on Thursday.

The Seattle office of the FBI did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Read the full report here.

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Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute to freedom of speech on Wednesday at a ceremony for a Dane whose cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad provoked Muslim protests that led to 50 deaths five years ago.

Merkel, who grew up in Communist East Germany, recalled her joy over the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “Freedom for me personally is the happiest experience of my life,” Merkel, 56, said at the conference on press freedom in Potsdam near Berlin. (Photo: Kurt Westergaard (L) congratulated by Angela Merkel (R) in Potsdam, September 8, 2010/Odd Andersen)

“Even 21 years after the Berlin Wall fell the force of freedom stirs me more than anything else,” she said.  She called press freedom a “precious commodity”.

Lars Vilks in Stockholm March 10, 2010/Bob Strong

Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who angered Muslims by portraying the Prophet Mohammad as a dog, has suffered a failed arson attack on his house, but was not home when it happened.

Vilks told Reuters on Saturday that people smashed windows at his house in the small town of Nynashamnsvage in southwest Sweden and tried to light petrol that they threw inside. But the attack resulted only in small damage in the kitchen and on the facade.

Earlier this week, Vilks was assaulted by a man during a lecture after he started showing a video (see below) about homosexuality and religion, particularly Islam. Vilks has been a target for Muslim protests since he depicted the Prophet Mohammad with the body of a dog in 2007.