The Cartoon Row

THE mood was tense yesterday in Noerrebro, the multi-cultural district of Copenhagen where the Cartoon War began. As TV pictures showed Danes fleeing the Middle East, Jan Smolarczyk complained about how his once-gentle adopted country had been turned upside down. "Suddenly everyone is asking themselves: are we bad people?", the 60-year-old Polish-born academic said. For years, Danes thought...

Fresh protests against newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad erupted across Afghanistan on Monday, with one demonstrator killed and up to four wounded in clashes, officials said. Protesters also threw stones at the Danish, British and French embassies in the capital Kabul as well as the main base for the United States-led coalition in Afghanistan and the head United Nations office. Police...

At least one person was killed and seven others wounded in the Puntland region of Somalia on Monday as security forces clashed with hundreds of Muslims protesting the publication in Europe of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, witnesses and police said. Police in the semi-autonomous region's town of Bossaso shot at demonstrators who were hurling stones at the offices of foreign aid agencies and the...

Police should come down "heavily" on anti-cartoon protesters who broke the law, a Cabinet Minister demanded today as an extremist cleric called for the artist to face execution. The Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain said the actions of some Muslims in London at the weekend had been "completely unacceptable and intolerable". Placards threatened a repeat of the 11 September and 7 July atrocities...

Protests that started after the publication of satirical cartoons of Prophet Mohammed by a Danish newspaper continue to spread day by day. Re-prints of the cartoons in the European press fueled the reactions that began with an economic boycott on Danish goods. After the Danish and Norwegian embassies were set on fire in the Syrian capital Damascus, the Danish consulate building in Lebanese capital...

MUSLIM protesters who threatened violence in demonstrations against cartoons of the prophet Mohammed should be treated with a "no tolerance" approach, the Conservatives have said. Shadow home secretary David Davis said some of the placards seen in protests in London amounted to "incitement to murder" and should be dealt with firmly by the police. Banners waved during two days of street protests in...

A cartoon in Italy's leading daily, Corriere della Sera, yesterday summed up the mood of nervousness in Europe's press. It depicted an artist drawing caricatures of Mohammed, looking terrified as his cartoon explodes into an atomic mushroom cloud, with the features of an angry bearded cleric. The French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, carried a signed editorial, asking blasphemers in the...

Johannesburg: Media groups here have reacted strongly to a restriction by a court on the publication by a local newspaper group of the Danish-origin cartoons about Prophet Mohammed that have sparked global outrage. Moulana Ebrahim Bham of the Jamiatul Ulema of Transvaal welcomed the court's decision and called on local Muslims - who had threatened drastic action similar to that by Muslims in Syria...

BEIRUT -- Thousands of Muslims rioted Sunday in downtown Beirut, setting fire to the Danish Consulate, attacking a Maronite Catholic church and smashing car and shop windows in protest of the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in Western newspapers. The violence took a sectarian turn as demonstrators cut an angry path through a predominantly Christian neighborhood. It was the first...

So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of...