A Danish caricaturist is making his first tour of the United States since the 2005 publication of his cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked fury across the Muslim world, according to a Danish press freedom group that is promoting the trip.
The International Free Press Society said the caricaturist, Kurt Westergaard, would appear on Wednesday in Manhattan and at Princeton University and on Thursday at Yale University, where the Yale University Press recently refused to include the cartoon in a book about the controversy.
Diana West, the vice president of the society, said Mr. Westergaard’s appearances coincided with the fourth anniversary of the original publication of the cartoon in a Danish newspaper. It showed Muhammad wearing a turban that looked like a bomb.
She said the society was commemorating the anniversary by declaring Wednesday as International Free Press Day “to mark what should have been just a completely unremarkable sheet of cartoons in a relatively small newspaper in a rather small country way far away, but became a world-shaking event that revealed the extent to which free speech in the West is in thrall to Islamic law.”
“What a sorry state we’ve come to if this causes cataclysms and rioting and fear in our own media,” said Ms. West, a syndicated columnist and author whose column is published in The Washington Examiner.
The free press society’s board of advisers includes a number of people who have been at odds with Muslims. Among them are the scholar Daniel Pipes, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports, and Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who leads an anti-Islam party that won about 15 percent of the vote in European Parliament elections in June.
Mr. Westergaard’s cartoon was one of 12 that initially appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 and was later reprinted elsewhere. Images of Muhammad are forbidden by Islam, and as word of the cartoons spread, violent protests in Asia, Africa and the Middle East followed, with mobs attacking Danish embassies and diplomatic offices.
Last year, two Tunisians and a Dane were arrested in Denmark and accused of planning a “terror-related assassination” of Mr. Westergaard.
Ms. West said security had been tightened for Mr. Westergaard’s appearance in New York, at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative-leaning group whose offices are on Vanderbilt Avenue.
Tom Conroy, a spokesman for Yale, said campus police had consulted with “outside authorities — state, local and federal — to ensure they’re doing whatever’s appropriate for the visit.”
At Princeton, Duncan Harrison, an associate director of the university’s Department of Public Safety, said that only students and faculty members with Princeton identification would be allowed to attend Mr. Westergaard’s talk, and that those wishing to do so had to reserve a place in advance. Dan May, a junior who is the editor in chief of American Foreign Policy magazine, one of two campus sponsors for the event, said roughly 80 people had done so by Tuesday afternoon.
Sohaib Sultan, the coordinator for Muslim life at Princeton, said he planned to attend, and would speak at the invitation of the event’s organizers, “to offer some reflection.”
Adam Nassr, a member of the Muslim Students Association on campus, said he was troubled but had decided not to protest
“I agree with free speech, and I get what he stands for,” Mr. Nassr said, “but I don’t agree with someone who’s directly insulting the faith of over a billion Muslims in the world. And it insulted me as a Muslim.”
