As the row over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad has intensified, media executives - in television, print and online - have faced some difficult decisions. Should they publish the pictures and risk offending Muslim readers and viewers? Or by not showing them, would they be preventing the public from coming to informed opinions about the controversy? Many people have rung or called the BBC...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington on Friday condemned caricatures in European newspapers of the Prophet Mohammad, siding with Muslims who are outraged that the publications put press freedom over respect for religion. By inserting itself into a dispute that has become a lightning rod for anti-European sentiment across the Muslim world, the United States could help its own battered image among...
One of the few certainties in the world of journalism and editorial policy is that the age old tension between freedom of expression, freedom of speech and the right to robust and occasionally rude debate will, from time to time, come into conflict with the sensibilities of those who feel insulted or abused and minorities who can feel oppressed by the slights, real or imagined, of the majority...
LONDON (Reuters) - Writers who fought long and hard for freedom of expression argued on Friday that the uproar over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad showed how easily art could be hijacked by politics and religion, with dangerous consequences. While some criticised the caricatures that first appeared in a Danish newspaper and have since been reproduced by some European media, they also repeated...
Palestinian gunmen burst into a West Bank hotel and whisked away a young German teacher, and Gaza militants surrounded European headquarters there, as Muslim outrage of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad spread from Pakistan all the way to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The West Bank kidnapping Thursday evening was short-lived. Within an hour, Palestinian police nabbed the gunmen and freed the...
On Friday the centre-left French newspaper Liberation printed two of the controversial Danish cartoons, describing them as "exhibits in the case". While criticising the caricatures as mediocre, the newspaper said its decision had been taken out of a concern to reaffirm values which were being damaged in France. "Liberation defends the freedom of expression," was the headline over the cartoons, one...
The Mohammed cartoons affair has triggered a debate in Switzerland over press freedom and respect for religious sensitivities. While Swiss Muslims have reacted with dismay to the publication of the controversial caricatures, the head of the Swiss Press Council, Peter Studer, says the rights of the press must be protected. The controversial images originated in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten paper and...
Wellington newspaper The Dominion Post will publish one of the Danish cartoons which have triggered strife overseas because they caricature the Prophet Mohammad. A number of European newspapers have published the images, first published by a Danish newspaper in September. The cartoons were reprinted earlier this month in a Christian magazine in Norway, and on Wednesday were published by French...
JAKARTA, Indonesia More than 150 hardline Muslims stormed into a high-rise building housing the Danish Embassy on Friday to protest the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, then tore down and burned the country's white and red flag. The rowdy protest was one of the first in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, against the 12 cartoons that first appeared in a Danish...
Denmark, best known for its liberal welfare society, Lego, Carlsberg and voting no to EU treaties, has suddenly become the unlikely epicentre of an escalating conflict between the Western and Muslim worlds. An outcry over a themed page last September on self-censorship and freedom of speech in Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s biggest newspaper, featuring 12 cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, has this week...
