Man Who Allegedly Stabbed Tourists Wanted to ‘Protect the Prophet Mohammed’

An Afghan man accused of stabbing two American tourists in Holland says he went there to “protect the Prophet Mohammed,” according to reports.

Jawed Santani, 20, told a judge during a hearing in Amsterdam on Monday that he “came to the Netherlands to protect my prophet,” adding that he was “planning to kill unfair and cruel people, those who make it possible for the Prophet Mohammed to be insulted,” the Daily Mail reported.

Santani reportedly mentioned that his alleged knife attack came only a day after the chairman of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, announced he would not go through with his plans to have a cartoon competition to caricature Mohammed in order to “avoid the risk of making people victims of Islamist violence.”

Reports said the judges asked Santani what he wanted to achieve by his actions, to which he replied, “I wanted to defend my religion and make it clear that my religion should be left alone. If you don’t do that, you should be prepared for these kind of actions.”

Santani reportedly arrived in Germany in 2015 as an asylum seeker and, on August 31, 2018, traveled to Amsterdam, where he approached two 38-year-old American tourists in the city’s central station and allegedly stabbed them.

Santani was being watched by officers at the station when he began the alleged attack. The officers quickly responded by shooting him in the hip. He was taken to the hospital and later arrested, according to reports.

Dutch prosecutors said Santani was “of the opinion that in the Netherlands the Prophet Muhammad, Islam and the Koran were insulted,” causing him to carry out the attack.

In September 2018, Breitbart News reported that Wilders responded to Santani’s accusations against the Netherlands on Twitter.

“Muslim terrorists hate our way of life and our freedoms. They answer criticism of Islam with violence, like this Jawed S.,” he wrote. “I say: close the borders and de-Islamisation!”

In February 2018, Wilders urged those in the West to take pride in their heritage and not to allow Islam to change the culture.

“If we in the West want to survive, if we want to overcome the existential crisis we are facing, we will need to de-Islamize our societies,” he wrote. “A people that is ashamed of its past, has no future. The future belongs to proud people, aware of their cultural and national identity and willing to defend it.”