Two student newspapers at Clemson University have reprinted the controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, upsetting Muslim students on campus and drawing a rebuke from the school’s president.
The papers, the conservative Tiger Town Observer and the liberal Clemson Forum, are not funded by the school, but the Observer has an on-campus office.
In an open letter e-mailed to Clemson students and staff, president James Barker said he was disappointed that the papers printed the cartoons, which were first published in a Danish newspaper and have sparked deadly riots around the world.
"While I wholeheartedly support freedom of the press and the right of student media to operate independently of administrative oversight and censorship, student journalists must understand that with rights come responsibilities, including the responsibility to be respectful of different faiths and beliefs," Barker wrote.
The letter said the cartoons were published in both papers Friday.
Mehmet Babacan, a student from Turkey who is president of Clemson’s Muslim Student Association, called the cartoons "disturbing."
"I just can’t understand, what’s their aim?" he said. "Certainly it’s not going to help our community at all to understand each other."
He said the group planned to issue a formal statement.
Muslims believe any image of Muhammad is sacrilegious. One of six cartoons published in the Observer depicts the prophet with a bomb in his turban.
Andrew Davis, editor of the Tiger Town Observer, said the staff agreed unanimously to publish the cartoons because the mainstream media’s refusal to print them meant most of the public had not seen the drawings at the center of the controversy.
"We feel it is our duty as journalists to disseminate information to the public," said Davis, a senior political science major from Surfside Beach.
Davis said both papers publish monthly. "This is our first issue since this whole fiasco has begun," he said.
Bill Rogers, executive director of the South Carolina Press Association, said he is aware of only one other newspaper in the state that published any of the cartoons: the Columbia City Paper, a seven-month-old, locally owned weekly.
That paper’s publisher, Paul Blake, said he felt the paper had a responsibility to print one of the cartoons to illustrate a column on the topic.
