International

I think, therefore I am, said the philosopher. Fine. But I think, therefore I speak? No way. Nobody has an absolute right to freedom. Civilisation is the story of humans sacrificing freedom so as to live together in harmony. We do not need Hobbes to tell us that absolute freedom is for newborn savages. All else is compromise. Should a right-wing Danish newspaper have carried the derisive images of...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Prominent Muslim scholar Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi condemned on Sunday the torching of Danish and Norwegian embassies in Arab capitals by Muslims angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, told Arabic television Al Jazeera that Muslims should instead channel their fury by boycotting goods of countries who published the drawings in their...

The worldwide campaign at street and diplomatic level against European newspaper publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed yesterday assumed ever more serious proportions. In Damascus, thousands of Syrian demonstrators set fire to both the Danish and Norwegian embassies, badly damaging the buildings. In Palestine, dozens of youths attacked the European Union's officer in Gaza, and, in Jordan, the...

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway will complain to the United Nations about Syria's failure to protect its embassy in Damascus from being torched by demonstrators angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said. "We condemn what happened in Damascus strongly, it's totally unacceptable and we are going to raise the question with the United Nations because this is a violation...

Danish ministers say the government can’t condemn the cartoons a daily published mocking the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and that freedom of speech is guaranteed for all and that freedom of the press is also guaranteed by the Danish constitution. This argument would have been accepted if the constitution does not state otherwise and if the Danish government can say the same thing when it...

Jason Burke in Paris, Luke Harding in Berlin, Alex Duval Smith in Copenhagen and Peter Beaumont in Ramallah If the consequences are global, the source is almost farcically local. You reach number 3 Grondals Street by taking the number 9 bus to the outskirts of the Danish city of Aarhus and getting off by the red post box half way up the hill. The modest single-story yellow brick building is the...

Damascus, Syria (AHN) - Thousands of Syrians enraged by caricatures of Islam's revered prophet torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Saturday - the most violent in days of furious protests by Muslims in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Violent demonstrations are taking place in Jordan as well. In Gaza, Palestinians marched through the streets, storming European buildings and...

IT WAS always intended to generate a debate about freedom of speech but, buried innocuously in the culture section of a newspaper, no-one guessed it would spark global protests, the burning of effigies and the unlikely cry of "Death to Denmark". The subject matter, admittedly, was contentious, involving a writer's struggle to find an illustrator for his book about the Koran, and in particular the...

WE HAVE, of course, seen it all before. That the printing of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad - particularly wearing a bomb for a turban - would provoke hysteria and violence across the Muslim world was entirely predictable to anyone who remembers the book-burning and fatwa that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Or indeed to anyone who has followed the rise of...

EUROPEANS hoisted the banner of press freedom last week in response to Muslim anger over a dozen Danish cartoons, some of them mocking the Prophet Muhammad. But something deeper and more complex was also at work: The fracas grew out of, and then fed, a war of polemics between Europe's anti-immigrant nationalists and the fundamentalist Muslims among its immigrants. "One extreme triggers the other,"...