The Danish cartoon that elicited so much outrage and protest from the Muslim world back in 2005 is being printed again.

German news service Deutsche Welle reports:

Five major daily Danish newspapers, 10 smaller papers and a Swedish daily reprinted on Wednesday, February 13, one of the 12 drawings of Mohammed that a Danish paper had published two years ago and which triggered global protests.The drawing was a caricature of the prophet, whose head was adorned with a turban that looked like a bomb with a lit fuse. In republishing the cartoon, editors vowed to defend freedom of expression.The act was in response to news on Tuesday that police had foiled a murder plot against the cartoonist.”We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend,” wrote the Berlingske Tidende, which reprinted the cartoon in its Wednesday edition.Police arrested a Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians on Tuesday, who were reportedly planning to murder 73-year-old Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist at the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, which originally published all 12 drawings in September 2005.

Europeans are taking an increasingly assertive stance against those who try to dictate what they can and cannot say. The reprinting of the same cartoons that prompted such outrage three years ago is a testament to this fact.

Watch for tension between a Catholicized Europe and Islam to increase. Incidents like these could very well be the first tremors of a coming clash of civilizations. To learn how, read “Europe and Muslims on Collision Course,” “Cartoon Crisis Is No Small Issue” and “Cartoon Jihad.”