International

Hundreds of British Muslims today gathered outside the Danish embassy in London to vent their anger over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Protesters held placards bearing slogans including "behead the one who insults the prophet" and "free speech go to hell". Demonstrators met outside the Regent's Park mosque, in central London, after Friday prayers before marching to the embassy on...

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen took to the airwaves on Thursday to directly address Muslims in an attempt to ease the tense situation arising from daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten's Mohammed caricatures. In an exclusive interview with Arabic satellite television station Al Arabiya, Rasmussen repeated that the nation's media was independent and that even the country's prime minister was not...

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was to meet foreign ambassadors today to brief them on the government’s position on the furore over a Danish newspaper’s publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. It was unclear which countries’ diplomats would attend the meeting, which also is to include Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller. Fogh Rasmussen and Moeller were to detail the government’s...

Two right-wing Italian newspapers on Friday published the 12 caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked outrage across the Muslim world, and printed editorials criticizing European media for giving in to pressure over the drawings. The drawings appeared on the front pages of the Libero daily under the headline "Muhammad rules here." La Padania newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Northern...

The publication of cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in Western papers has sparked government protests and street demonstrations in several countries across the Muslim world. But Muslims in Europe and the United States have been less publicly outspoken. One reason may be that Muslim community leaders in many Western countries -- though they are unhappy with the depictions of the Prophet...

PARIS (Reuters) - The row over caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammad resembles a dialogue of the deaf, with many European spokesmen defending the right to free speech and many Muslims insisting Islam must be treated with respect. Calls for moderation, both from Muslim leaders and European politicians, risk getting lost in a public debate dominated by Europeans afraid of losing a core right of...

A wave of violent protests and heated debate has been brewing across Europe and the Middle East about the controversial decision of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons satirising Islam. Last September, the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten printed the 12 cartoons (which included caricatures of the prophet Mohammed), provoking outrage from Muslim extremists, both in Denmark and abroad. Pressure...

BUDAPEST: The Western news media is unlikely to heed the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and the European politicians who have condemned the provocative nature of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, which have provoked rage in the Muslim world. But it does need to engage in serious debate about its preferred role in mediating between cultures. This should start with the admission that...

The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our...

In December, before the controversy over the publication of a series of Danish newspaper cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed became a global issue, the Muslim writer & broadcaster Kenan Malik addressed the key issues raised by the furore and others like it at a conference debate convened by Index on Censorship. This is what he said. There are two questions I want to address here. In a plural...