PARIS - The controversy over the publication in of the Muhammad cartoons has left France deeply divided and worried about a revival of tensions among its more than five million Muslims. In a country still recovering from November's rioting by many young French-born Arabs, a controversy which pitched respect for the sacred figure of Islam against the freedom of expression was the last thing it...
MUSLIM protesters threatened more terrorist attacks as they converged in their hundreds outside the Danish Embassy in London yesterday for what organisers said was the start of a new holy war in Britain. Parading banners that called for the killing of newspaper editors and broadcasters from the BBC who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, they marched across the capital from the mosque in...
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) -- Hundreds of Syrian demonstrators stormed the Danish Embassy in Damascus Saturday and set fire to the building, witnesses said. The demonstrators were protesting offensive caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammed that were first published in a Danish newspaper several months ago. Witnesses said the demonstrators set fire to the entire building, which also houses the embassies...
No serious American newspaper would commission images of Jesus that were solely designed to offend Christians. And if one did, the reaction would be swift and certain. Politicians would take to the floors of Congress and call down thunder on the malefactors. Some Christians would react with fury and boycotts and flaming e-mails that couldn't be printed in a family newspaper; others would react...
FREEDOM OF expression is not the only value at issue in the conflict provoked by a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons satirizing Islam's founding prophet, Mohammed. The billowing controversy is being swept along by intolerance, ignorance, and parochialism. The refusal of each camp to recognize and respect the otherness of the other brings closer a calamitous clash of cultures pitting Islam...
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African court has granted a request by a Muslim group to bar publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad which have caused outrage among Muslims worldwide, an editor's group said on Saturday. The South African National Editor's Forum (SANEF) said the judge's order covered most major media companies in the country and amounted to "pre-publication censorship" by...
Sunday newspapers will not be allowed to publish a controversial cartoon of the prophet Muhammad after a Muslim pressure group was granted a court interdict. The South African National Editors Forum said on Saturday several South African media houses were gagged from publishing the cartoon on Friday night. The Jamiat-ul Ulama of Transvaal, which sought an interdict against Johncom Media and...
The cartoon drawings of the Prophet Muhammad published by various European paper recently are highly offensive, provocative and incendiary. Muslim indignation is understandable. Editorial cartoonists are often deliberately inflammatory to make a point but they find out pretty quickly if they've crossed the line - their editors are deluged with angry letters. In the case of at least one of the...
The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns the publication by a series of European newspapers of defamatory cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist and killer. These crude caricatures, intended to insult and incite Muslim sensibilities, are a political provocation. Their publication, initially by a right-wing Danish newspaper with historical ties to German and Italian...
Stalin's quip - "How many divisions has the Pope?" - is often taken for a universal truth: for all its power to describe man's nature and destiny, religion lacks the brute force to affect the world of politics and diplomacy. The uproar over caricatures of Mohammed that appeared in a Danish daily shows that the rule does not apply to Islam in quite the same way. This week's death threats, bomb...
