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The battle is set, of religious extremism versus freedom of speech. These are the lines drawn, or so we are told, in the escalating tensions worldwide surrounding the printing of images of Muhammad in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe. Although the media is only now picking up on this story, my inbox has been receiving messages about these cartoons for weeks. The messages range from high-pitched to...

Friday prayers in the Muslim world helped fuel further outrage against the caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed published in Europe, at the same time that the controversy promised to continue as more and more European publications were re-printing the cartoons. As the controversy widened, what began to crystallize Friday was a clash-of-civilizations collision between Western views of freedom of...

Hundreds of British Muslims today gathered outside the Danish embassy in London to vent their anger over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Protesters held placards bearing slogans including "behead the one who insults the prophet" and "free speech go to hell". Demonstrators met outside the Regent's Park mosque, in central London, after Friday prayers before marching to the embassy on...

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen took to the airwaves on Thursday to directly address Muslims in an attempt to ease the tense situation arising from daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten's Mohammed caricatures. In an exclusive interview with Arabic satellite television station Al Arabiya, Rasmussen repeated that the nation's media was independent and that even the country's prime minister was not...

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was to meet foreign ambassadors today to brief them on the government’s position on the furore over a Danish newspaper’s publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. It was unclear which countries’ diplomats would attend the meeting, which also is to include Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller. Fogh Rasmussen and Moeller were to detail the government’s...

Two right-wing Italian newspapers on Friday published the 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked outrage across the Muslim world, and printed editorials criticizing European media for giving in to pressure over the drawings. The drawings appeared on the front pages of the Libero daily under the headline "Muhammad rules here." La Padania newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Northern...

The publication of cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Western papers has sparked government protests and street demonstrations in several countries across the Muslim world. But Muslims in Europe and the United States have been less publicly outspoken. One reason may be that Muslim community leaders in many Western countries -- though they are unhappy with the depictions of the Prophet...

PARIS (Reuters) - The row over caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammad resembles a dialogue of the deaf, with many European spokesmen defending the right to free speech and many Muslims insisting Islam must be treated with respect. Calls for moderation, both from Muslim leaders and European politicians, risk getting lost in a public debate dominated by Europeans afraid of losing a core right of...

A wave of violent protests and heated debate has been brewing across Europe and the Middle East about the controversial decision of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons satirising Islam. Last September, the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten printed the 12 cartoons (which included caricatures of the prophet Mohammed), provoking outrage from Muslim extremists, both in Denmark and abroad. Pressure...

BUDAPEST: The Western news media is unlikely to heed the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and the European politicians who have condemned the provocative nature of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which have provoked rage in the Muslim world. But it does need to engage in serious debate about its preferred role in mediating between cultures. This should start with the admission that...