Jerry Ceppos' op-ed article Tuesday (``We must see cartoons to understand furor'') poses interesting questions about why U.S. newspapers have not shown the offensive Danish cartoons. As a Muslim American, I suggest a number of good reasons why U.S. newspapers refrained from reprinting the cartoons. Reprinting them would spread further the xenophobic, anti-Muslim feelings now prevalent in much of...
Tolerance of the aggressively intolerant must have its limits. Fanatics who threaten those who disagree with them with massacres and beheadings have crossed that line. Yet the British police have failed to act against demonstrators who did just that last weekend. Contemporary Britain swallows camels and strains at gnats: it criminalises the expression of prejudice, but balks at prosecuting...
COPENHAGEN, Feb. 7 -- The global furor over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad can be traced to one day last September when newspaper editor Flemming Rose smelled a good story. He said he'd read that museums in Sweden and London had recently removed artworks their staff deemed offensive to Muslims. A Danish comedian told him that he felt free to desecrate the Bible but that he'd be afraid to do the...
COPENHAGEN, Feb 8 (Reuters) - The Danish newspaper that first published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, infuriating Muslims worldwide, previously turned down cartoons of Jesus as too offensive, the cartoonist said on Wednesday. The newspaper's editor said the Jesus cartoon was unsolicited. He added that he hoped to publish Holocaust-themed cartoons that an Iran newspaper has solicited as a...
PREMIER Peter Beattie has strongly supported freedom of speech after a second Queensland newspaper published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. The Rockhampton Morning Bulletin today joined Brisbane's Courier-Mail in publishing one of 12 cartoons first printed in Denmark and which have sparked a violent backlash across the Muslim world. Any depiction of Mohammed is considered blasphemous and...
A French court yesterday turned down a request by Muslim groups to gag a satirical weekly which today publishes all 12 of the cartoons and a new caricature. The Muslim Council of France told the Paris civil court that the cartoons incited religious or racial hatred. The court ruled the application inadmissible on a technicality. Charlie Hebdo's director and editor-in-chief, Philippe Val, said...
Why haven't Muslims in Canada taken to the streets in large numbers to protest against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed? It's not because everyone in Canada is so nice to each other, say Canadian Muslim leaders and Islamic scholars. It's because Canada's multiculturalism is complex. They say Muslim immigration into Canada has been different. So has Muslim integration into Canadian society. And so...
The Danish editor behind the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that ignited deadly riots in the Muslim world said Wednesday that he was trying to coordinate with an Iranian paper soliciting cartoons on the Holocaust. "My newspaper is trying to establish a contact with the Iranian newspaper, and we would run the cartoons the same day as they publish them," Flemming Rose said...
Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo published a new cartoon of the prophet Muhammad on its cover, as a French Muslim group, in a plea for free expression, condemned the violence that Danish caricatures sparked in Muslim countries. The wave of protests, ``orchestrated four months after the facts, aims at caging all freedom of thought by artists and intellectuals,'' Tewfik...
The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper's publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight. Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff: New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the...
