International

The ongoing riots throughout the Middle East and the burnings this past weekend of Danish government offices in Damascus and Beirut in protest of newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad bear the fingerprints of "Iranian and Syrian plotting," Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt charged during an exclusive interview. He warned Syria and Iran might use the cartoon riots as a pretense to attack...

OSLO, Feb 7 (Reuters) - The head of Norway's press association, whose life has been threatened by Muslims angered by satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, said on Tuesday the right to offend others was crucial to freedom of expression. Amid spiralling unrest over the images, Per Edgar Kokkvold, Secretary-General of the Norwegian Press Association, told Reuters in an interview he was unafraid...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The Muslim cleric blamed for instigating protests over a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad said Tuesday that he never intended for rioters to attack Danish embassies and businesses in the Middle East and that he was crying for Denmark. But Ahmed Abu-Laban, who leads a mosque in Copenhagen's Muslim neighborhood, also said Danish officials brought the crisis on...

COPENHAGEN: With its embassies under attack and its products facing boycotts, Denmark has had its hands full this week. On top of that, some Danes feel they have been let down by their Western allies as they stand under attack for a Danish newspaper's satirical cartoons about Islam. That mood lifted some Tuesday when President George W. Bush called Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said...

MOSCOW, February 7 (RIA Novosti) - An official on Russia's Mufti Council said the organization would make every effort to prevent the violence that could erupt to protest the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in the European media. "Now, the Mufti Council is restraining the situation in Russia to prevent the kinds of developments that took place in certain countries in the past days. The...

TO publish or not to publish the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed? That's the question weighing on the minds of newspaper editors around the country. The cartoons have caused global outrage but you will probably never see them. And it's a good thing, too. The 12 drawings by a Danish cartoonist which depict the Prophet Mohammed in a negative light were initially published in a Danish...

Israel's newspapers yesterday contrasted the Muslim world's furious response to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed with the restrained way it reacted to anti-Semitic caricatures in Arab media. Hook-nosed Jews manipulating American foreign policy, Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, drinking the blood of Palestinian children and Israelis wearing swastikas have all been depicted in newspapers...

Cartoons making fun of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in a Danish newspaper last September are suddenly one of the hottest issues in international politics. Muslims in Europe and across the Middle East have been holding protests with growing levels of violence and now loss of life. The easy points to make about the continuing crisis are that (a) people are bound to be offended if their...

The editor of a Polish newspaper that reprinted images of the Prophet Muhammad said on Tuesday that he was sorry if the publication gave offence to Muslims, but defended it as an act of solidarity. The Rzeczpospolita daily on Saturday reproduced two caricatures that originally appeared in a Danish newspaper, along with a commentary defending media freedom by editor Grzegorz Gauden. The move was...

Only an irresponsible and intellectually inept individual would sketch such insulting images as those depicting Prophet Mohammed by a cartoonist in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper. And no self-respecting newspaper would allow itself to run such filth. However, the backlash in the Muslim world highlights a much more serious issue. Jyllands-Posten - and another newspaper in Norway that re-ran...