Hmmmm. So Muslims assert the right to tell Western newspapers what they can publish.
Offending Cartoons Reprinted
European Dailies Defend Right to Publish Prophet Caricatures
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 2, 2006; Page A17
PARIS, Feb. 1 -- Newspapers across Europe reprinted cartoons Wednesday ridiculing the prophet Muhammad, saying they wanted to support the right of Danish and Norwegian papers to publish the caricatures, which have ignited fury among Muslims throughout the world.
Germany's Die Welt daily newspaper published one of the drawings on its front page and said the "right to blasphemy" is one of the freedoms of democracy.
washingtonpost.com
LETTER FROM COPENHAGEN
Cartoons of Prophet Spark Boycott by Arabs
By JEFFRY MALLOW
February 3, 2006
Denmark has become, much to its tolerant citizens' bewilderment, the target of an international Muslim boycott, in protest of what international Muslim groups call Denmark's "aggressive campaign waged against Islam and its prophet."
"Boycott" actually understates the case. In the past week alone, crowds of angry Muslims in several Arab countries burned the Danish flag, a mob attacked European Union offices in Gaza and at least two Danes were beaten in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador from Denmark; Libya closed its embassy, and Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Sudan lodged official protests. A meeting of Arab interior ministers in Tunis demanded that Denmark punish the "authors" of the offense. Danish products were taken off the shelves in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain and other countries, forcing one Danish dairy firm to lay off 800 workers. The European Union trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, struck back with a threat to haul the Saudis before the World Trade Organization. Muslim states replied by submitting a complaint to the United Nations. At midweek the dispute was growing into a full-scale global confrontation between Islam and the West.
The cause of the fury? A dozen cartoons that were published in a Danish newspaper last September, depicting the Prophet Muhammad in satiric guises. One showed him with a fuse attached to his turban; another showed him telling dead suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins to reward them.
The newspaper, mass-circulation daily Jyllands-Posten, published the cartoons as part of a tongue-in-cheek contest, after a local author publicly complained that he could not find an illustrator for his biography of Muhammad. The cartoons prompted protests by Arab ambassadors, but the affair blew over quickly.
It erupted again in mid-January when the cartoons were republished in a Norwegian magazine, this time drawing angry attention across the Muslim world. The protests are focused, for the most part, not on the cartoons' tone, but on the mere fact of them. Muslim religious law forbids any depiction of Muhammad. Pundits across the Arab world say Denmark transgressed that sensitivity.
Jyllands-Posten will never win any awards for good taste. Several years ago, during a petition campaign against anti-Israel bias in the press, the paper saw fit to publish a letter from a Dane who tried to discredit the petition by counting its "Jewish names." (Of course he got it wrong, targeting Vikings named Weber and missing Jews named Mallow.)
This time, the newspaper actually apologized for its unintended insult to Muslims — but not for publishing the cartoons, citing the inalienable right of news organizations to free expression.
The Danish government took the same tack. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen took strong exception to the content of the cartoons but reiterated the right of the press to free expression, however ill advised.
But the furor has not died down. The 55-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference declared this week that Denmark's refusal to censor its newspapers was, oddly, "an affront to free expression." Abu Bashar, a local Danish imam who is a chaplain at Nyborg State Prison, told the BBC — falsely — that the cartoons showed Muhammad with a pig's nose and ears. Two Danish Protestant bishops replied that the burning of the Danish flag, which has a cross as its pattern, was a desecration of Christianity.
Danish intellectuals have offered a variety of proposals to de-escalate the crisis. A lecturer at Syddansk University's Middle East Institute, Helle Lykke Nielsen, proposed that the prime minister and foreign minister travel the Arab states on an apology tour. (Not likely; several Arab governments already have warned the two to stay away.) Aarhus University professor Mehdi Mozaffari counseled the opposite: "Keep cool. Once Fogh [Rasmussen] has apologized, the next thing will be [a demand for] apologies from the queen and the parliament."
Danes themselves seem shocked. They are, after all, citizens of a country that has opened its doors to tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in recent decades. They have been generous in their support, monetary and political, for the Palestinian cause. Danish public debate, strongly pro-Israel a generation ago, has followed the general European shift toward the Palestinians. Just days before the Palestinian election, Denmark's Channel 2 Television rebroadcast a 2002 documentary on the "Jenin massacre," reviving the now-discredited slur that Israel perpetrated a mass killing in the West Bank city. The film was a tendentious mélange of anti-Israel propaganda that somehow never mentioned the U.N. investigation showing the "massacre" to be a fabrication.
Then again, the same Channel 2 broadcast a program this week on the 1969 American moon landing. This gave equal time to crackpots who say that the whole thing was faked. Perhaps nothing should be surprising in a country that has as its national hero a teller of fairy-tales, Hans Christian Andersen.
For all that, the boycott has brought to the surface a simmering resentment that many Danes feel toward their country's Muslim minority. A mixture of Arabs, Turks and Kurds, Muslims make up about 3% of Denmark's population of 5.3 million. As in much of Europe, the Muslim minority remains outside the mainstream, unassimilated and largely alienated from Denmark's freewheeling culture.
In the face of continual lecturing from high-minded liberals who blame it all on Danish racism, a public backlash has arisen. The satirical cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are merely one example.
More soberly, observers compare the Muslim immigration to the earlier immigration of Jews fleeing communist Poland in the late 1960s. The Jews, critics note, all have integrated and given their children Danish citizenship. Many Muslims have done neither.
As in France and the Netherlands, the anti-Muslim backlash has a political edge. The far-right, anti-immigrant Danish People's Party, riding anti-Muslim resentment, emerged as the third largest party in the past two parliamentary elections, in 2001 and 2005, with 13% of the vote.
This week, the talk was turning nasty. Some press commentators were calling for a counter-boycott of Muslim shops in Denmark. Happily, most mainstream voices rejected the tactic. Some moderate Muslims, such as leftist parliamentarian Naser Khader, are calling for calm dialogue. But more Muslims were supporting the boycott, fueling the tension further.
It doesn't help that Muslims — both here and in the Middle East — seem to many Danes to be demanding more than just respect. Most Danes agree that it's unfair to depict the prophet of Islam as a mad bomber. But many public voices in the Arab and Muslim press are going further: They want Denmark and the West to honor the Muslim religious ban on any depictions of Muhammad. That raises images of imposing Sharia law on Denmark, a country that guards its freedom of expression almost — well, religiously. Besides, as one observer noted this week, Jewish religious law forbids the depiction of God, but Jews don't boycott Italy for Michelangelo's "Creation."
Denmark, like France, Great Britain and the Netherlands, is finally being forced to face the question of just what it means to be an immigrant. Does it mean accepting the culture of one's adopted homeland, keeping one's own roots as long as they don't violate the law? Or does it mean, "Thanks for a piece of your territory, and now I will teach you — or force you — to live by my norms"? And what's a free society to do about it?
forward.com
More papers join cartoon furore
Thursday 02 February 2006, 4:07 Makka Time, 1:07 GMT
A Danish newspaper was the first to publish the cartoons
Related:
Muhammad cartoon row goes global
Attack threat as cartoon row escalates
French daily prints anti-Islam cartoons
Fury grows over Denmark cartoons
Denmark PM rejects apology demand
Saudi envoy recalled from Denmark
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Both a French and a German newspaper have reprinted a series of 12 Danish newspaper cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad that have sparked protests in the Muslim world.
With a mounting diplomatic storm, calls for a boycott of Danish goods and flag-burning protests, Danish security police met Muslim religious leaders in an attempt to contain any domestic reaction to cartoons first run by the Jyllands-Posten paper.
Police said they had won a pledge from Denmark's imams to work to prevent an escalation of the row while the France Soir daily said it had published the cartoons in the name of freedom of expression and to fight religious intolerance.
"Because no religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society, France Soir publishes the incriminated cartoons," the paper said.
Under a headline "Yes, we have the right to caricature God", the paper ran a front page cartoon with Buddha, the Christian and Jewish Gods and Prophet Muhammad sitting on a cloud above Earth, with the Christian God saying: "Don't complain Muhammad, we've all been caricatured here."
Unapologetic
France Soir, which is in financial difficulties and looking for a buyer, devoted two inside pages to the Danish cartoons, with editor Serge Faubert unapologetic.
"There is no right to protection from satire in the West; there is a right to blasphemy"
Serge Faubert
France Soir editor
"Enough lessons from these reactionary bigots! There is nothing in these incriminated cartoons that intends to be racist or denigrate any community as such," he wrote in a commentary.
"Some are funny, others less so. That's it. That is why we have decided to publish them."
The German Welt daily put one of the drawings on its front page on Wednesday, saying the picture was "harmless" and regretting that the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily had apologised for causing offense.
"Democracy is the institutionalised form of freedom of expression," the paper said in a front-page commentary.
"There is no right to protection from satire in the West; there is a right to blasphemy."
Outcry
The cartoons caused an uproar in the Arab and Muslim world.
There have been protests across
the Muslim world
Thousands of Palestinians protested against Denmark for allowing publication of the cartoons and Arab ministers called on it to punish the newspaper that first printed them.
Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador from Copenhagen and Libya has closed its embassy.
Qatar condemned the cartoons.
Jyllands-Posten has apologised for any hurt caused, but the government says it cannot tell free media what to do.
Business losses
Danish-Swedish dairy product maker Arla Foods, with annual Middle East sales of 3 billion Danish crowns ($488 million), said it was talking to unions about 140 job cuts due to the
boycott.
Some Arab countries have pulled
Danish products from the shelves
"We are losing around 10 million crowns per day at the moment," a spokeswoman said.
The world's biggest maker of insulin, Novo Nordisk, said it was also hit as pharmacies and hospitals in Saudi Arabia have avoided its products since Saturday.
Islam sees images of its prophet as disrespectful and caricatures as blasphemous. One of the drawings published in September seemed to portray Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.
A Norwegian paper has also reprinted the cartoons this year.
French Muslims quiet
There was no comment on the France Soir move from the leaders of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), a body set up to represent France's 5 million Muslims.
French relations with Muslims have been strained by a 2004 law banning religious symbols in state schools, which prohibited the wearing of Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in secular state schools.
Meanwhile, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) voiced alarm on Wednesday over a call by Arab states for Denmark to punish the authors of newspaper cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad.
Media rights
RSF Secretary General Robert Menard told AFP he was "extremely worried by the reaction of Arab regimes, which betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of press freedom."
Muslim anger over the 12 caricatures has boiled over into a diplomatic crisis threatening Danish trade relations with the Muslim world.
Press freedom extends "to include the publication of information that is shocking for the population. The European Court of Human Rights says so. It is an essential accomplishment of democracy," he argued.
Robert Menard
Secretary General, Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Commenting on a call issued by Arab interior ministers for Copenhagen to "firmly sanction" the cartoons' authors, Menard said "the reaction shows very well the idea that they have (of press-government relations) when they ask the Danish government to intervene."
Arab regimes "do not understand that there can be a complete separation between what is written in a newspaper and what the Danish government says," Menard told AFP.
Denmark ranks among the world's top four or five countries in terms of respect for press freedom, according to the Paris-based RSF.
On the broader question of whether the Jyllands-Posten was right to have published the cartoons, Menard said "there was no need for discussion."
Press freedom extends "to include the publication of information that is shocking for the population. The European Court of Human Rights says so. It is an essential accomplishment of democracy," he argued.
"All the countries in Europe should be behind the Danes and the Danish authorities to defend the principle that a newspaper can writes what it wishes to ... even if it offends people," he said.
Anti-Muslim protests
Also on Wednesday, police in Copenhagen said they were bracing for anti-Muslim protests in the Danish capital in reaction to Muslim anger over the cartoons' publication.
Deputy police director Mogens Kjaergaard Moeller said: "We are aware that there are calls from several groups circulating, notably on the internet, for protests. We are ready."
He said he was aware of "rumours" that Danish right-wing youths were planning anti-Muslim protests in the central Town Hall Square, but police had not received a request for permission to hold a demonstration.
"Obviously ... we are watching what is happening very closely. That is reflected in our current security level in Copenhagen," he said.
"We are maintaining the very high level that we already have in place," he added.
According to Danish news agency Ritzau, Danish youths may burn copies of the Quran in order to demonstrate their "distance to Islam".
The protest could also be held on Saturday.
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