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 Sloane Street, west London.
One, 26-year-old Bushra Varakat, said Muslims would not accept being the target of "ridicule." "We don't know why these silly people use these cartoons unless they were showing how much they hate us," Ms Varakat, a student, said.
Shortly before the protest began, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, attacked the media outlets that had republished the images.
"There is freedom of speech - we all respect that - but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory," he told reporters.
Mr Straw praised the British media's "sensitivity" over the issue after UK newspapers declined to print the cartoons, which first appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily in September.
UK broadcasters, including the BBC and Channel 4, have shown brief glimpses of the images. The Spectator magazine briefly published them on its website, but they were removed last night.
Two rightwing newspapers in Italy, Libero and La Padania, ran the cartoons today and criticised the European media for "giving in" to pressure. "It is not a challenge, a provocation, but the defence of freedom," a front page editorial in La Padania said.
Newspapers in Germany, Belgium and Bulgaria have also printed the drawings, while the director of the French daily France Soir was fired by the paper's owner yesterday after it ran the images. "Of course, no one disputes the freedom of speech in Europe," Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said.
"Newspapers and broadcasters have the right to publish these offensive cartoons. The question is clearly whether they are exercising good judgment if they do so."
The cartoons have caused fury among Muslims, who consider any images of Muhammad to be blasphemous. Their religious tradition bars any depiction of the prophet to prevent idolatry.
Some of the cartoons depict the prophet pejoratively, with one showing him declaring that paradise had run out of virgins for suicide bombers and another depicting him with a turban shaped like a bomb.
Violent demonstrations were continuing around the world today. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, protesters broke into the lobby of the building housing the Danish embassy, pelting part of it with eggs.
In an overnight incident, Palestinian militants threw a pipe bomb at the French cultural centre in Gaza City and gunmen opened fire on the building. Yesterday, a grenade was thrown into the building. No one was hurt in the attacks.
There were expected to be more protests in the Palestinian territories later today.
Armed factions last night threatened to kidnap Europeans unless their governments apologised for publishing the cartoons. A German teacher was briefly kidnapped by gunmen in Nablus, while gunmen in Gaza stormed the EU building.
Islamic groups called for protests to be held in Iraq and Egypt as Muslims went to Friday prayers.
Elsewhere, several politicians in Pakistan's parliament criticised the series of 12 cartoons.
The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, yesterday told the al-Arabiya television channel that Danish people "deeply respect all people, including Islam", and that no offence had been intended.
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said freedom of the press should not be an excuse for insulting religions, while the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, said newspapers had been deliberately provocative.
However, the French interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, said he preferred "an excess of caricature to an excess of censure".
