Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who is known for his criticism of Islam, on Saturday announced he has revived his plan to hold a contest for cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Mohammad, Reuters reports.
In a post on Twitter, Wilders called on people to send in their Mohammad cartoons.
“Freedom of speech must prevail over violence and Islamic fatwas,” he wrote.
In 2015, Wilders caused a storm in his country after he announced plans to broadcast cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, the founder of Islam, on national television.
Wilders canceled a similar contest in August last year after police arrested a man who had threatened to kill him over his plan.
His stance against Islam has in the past sparked outrage around the Muslim world and prompted death threats that have led to him living under round-the-clock protection.
In January of 2015, gunmen killed 12 people at the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in anger at the magazine's cartoons featuring the Prophet. The magazine had previously been targeted over its portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed.
In May of that year, a competition featuring Mohammed cartoons in a suburb of Dallas, Texas came under attack by two gunmen. Police in Arizona later stepped up security near a mosque in Phoenix, where protesters from an anti-Islam group planned to draw cartoons of the prophet.
In 2012, the "Innocence of Muslims" film, which depicted the Muslim prophet as a thuggish deviant, triggered a wave of violent protests in the Muslim world that left dozens dead.
Wilders’ revival of the Mohammad cartoon contest followed his call on Thursday for the Netherlands to expel the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, over her intention to investigate Israel for “war crimes” in Palestinian Authority (PA)-assigned territories.