International

ISLAMABAD, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Police fired teargas and rubber bullets to break up a banned protest against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in Islamabad on Sunday and Denmark said its ambassador to Pakistan had returned home for security reasons. The government banned the demonstration after similar protests in Pakistan turned violent, with at least five people killed in the past week. The...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- A joint Spanish-Turkish initiative backed by the United Nations is being mentioned as a possible forum for restoring calm between Europe and the Islamic world following the Mohammed cartoon debacle originally triggered by Denmark. This is the Alliance for Civilization, first mentioned in the context of the cartoon crisis by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan last week...

What if the world went up in a mushroom cloud over a cartoon -- or because of a photograph of some reveler dressed up like a pig? Well, of course, that would be absurd, a comedy, a Clouseauean flick about a bumbling inspector, right? No, that would be a documentary about the end of civilization circa 2006 -- unless we come to our senses. The cartoon implosion now rocking the Muslim world --...

History will tell it as a story of cartoons, a case of satire aimed at Muslims and the Prophet Mohammad. Cartoons so offensive that, four months after their publication in a Danish newspaper, they sparked off enraged protests around the Islamic world unleashing a fury of violence against the blasphemous, godless and desecrating West. Calling up the phantoms of religious wars and racial conflicts...

MUCH has been said and done in response to the deliberately offensive anti-Muslim cartoons published late last year by a conservative Danish newspaper, and profusely printed in many Europeans and non-European media, including South Africa, Jordan and Malaysia. While the prevalent narrative in the mainstream Western media has treacherously defended the essentially Western emphasis on freedom of...

JEDDAH, 18 February 2006 – Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is contacting member states for an emergency meeting of their foreign ministers shortly to discuss major issues including the repercussions of the sacrilegious Danish cartoons. Ihsanoglu has already spoken to Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, Yemeni Foreign Minister...

THE American left and right don't agree on much, but weeks of demonstrations and embassy burnings have pushed them toward convergence on one point: there is, if not a clash of civilizations, at least a very big gap between the "Western world" and the "Muslim world." When you get beyond this consensus – the cultural chasm consensus – and ask what to do about the problem, there is less agreement...

(AgapePress) - According to the Quran, depicting the prophet Muhammad in any "mortal medium" is forbidden. Tell that to the editors of the Daily Tar Heel and the Western Standard, who are claiming they are fully within their rights as journalists to publish cartoons portraying the founder of Islam -- some of which have sparked a great deal of outrage in the Muslim world. The student newspaper at...

A Gallup newspaper is facing heat after it became the first paper in the state to publish a controversial cartoon that had led to violence elsewhere. The Gallup Independent published two cartoons poking fun at Mohammed, the prophet of Islam. Jamal Jawad, who is Muslim, said he supports freedom of the press, but doesn’t support the paper’s decision. "The newspaper just wants publicity for its own...

European Jews have expressed a mixture of anger and frustration as the furor over a Muslim cartoon erupted into violence in Europe and the Middle East. As frequent targets of anti-Semitic cartoons – many of them in the Arab press – Jews on one hand sympathized with the Muslim outrage over depictions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, which is considered by Muslims to be blasphemous. But Jews joined...