Bosch Fawstin, the man who won the controversial "Draw Prophet Mohammad" contest in Garland, Texas, calls himself a "recovered Muslim" who now aims at defending freedom of speech.
"I never set out to draw Mohammad. I never set out to become a critic of Islam until post-9/11, until the Danish cartoons. That's when we were all forced into this defence of free speech," Fawstin told Fox News Channel's 'On the Record with Greta Van Susteren'.
Bosch Fawstin, a US-based cartoonist and blogger whose parents were from Albania, was born a Muslim, but he quit the religion and now describes himself as a "radical critic of Islam".
On his personal blog, Fawstin goes on to compare Islam with Nazism.
"My name is Bosch and I'm a recovered Muslim. That is, if Muslims don't kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do. That's just one of the reasons I've been writing and drawing against Islam and its Jihad for a number of years now," Fawstin stated.
"But fortunately for us, Islam hasn't been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn't able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don't aren't," he further said. And his winning Prophet cartoon was the reflection of his opinion of Islam.
For the Texas event, Fawstin drew a caricature of Mohammad wearing a turban and holding up a sword and angrily saying, "You can't draw me." To this, the artist's hand in Fawstin's poignant black and white sketch replies: "That's why I draw you."
Fawstin's Mohammad cartoon was among the 350 submissions that were received at the Garland event. Soon after the Garland shooting incident, the outspoken artist tweeed: "My favourite drawings at the Mohammad cartoon festival in Texas were the two chalk outlines out front."
While in another post, he said: "They came to kill us and died for it. Justice. #GarlandAttack." Fawstin, who is an Eisner Award nominated cartoonist, is currently working on a graphic novel, titled "THE INFIDEL" (featuring Pigman).
