Whether a butterfly's wing beat can cause a tornado is still a central debate of chaos theory. But it is now proven that drawings first published more than four months ago in Denmark have seeded outrage among Muslims from Gaza to Jakarta and embittered believers making their lives in Europe. An editor's decision--call it feisty or cavalier--to ask Danish cartoonists to depict the Prophet Muhammad...
Leaving the politics of it aside, the issue is a fairly straight forward one. It is simply about values. The Danes who published the cartoons ridiculing the Prophet of my faith, degrading and attacking my religion also claim they merely exercised their right of expression-of freedom of speech. Then there were others in Europe who rose to the defense of the Danish act of insulting the prophet. They...
The iconic image of last week was in the Gaza Strip. It was of a Palestinian gunman astride the local office of the European Union. All the diplomatic staff had fled, tipped off ahead of time. The source of the militant's ire? A series of satirical cartoons originally published in Denmark. Yes, cartoons. A Danish paper, a while back, had commissioned a set of cartoons depicting the fear that many...
Wellington - New Zealand was braced on Sunday for fallout from the Islamic world after two newspapers published controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, with a potential trade ban by Iran the main concern. New Zealand diplomats in Muslim countries were also warned to take precautions against possible threats to staff and property, the Sunday Star Times reported. The New Zealand...
COPENHAGEN, Feb. 2 – As a Danish citizen of Pakistani descent, a onetime television anchor and now a prominent author married to a Dane, Rushy Rashid has led what could be depicted as a high-profile life. But, she said, nothing has forced her to define her attitude to fellow Muslims quite so much as Denmark's bitter dispute with much of the Islamic world over a newspaper's decision to print...
PARIS - The controversy over the publication in of the Muhammad cartoons has left France deeply divided and worried about a revival of tensions among its more than five million Muslims. In a country still recovering from November's rioting by many young French-born Arabs, a controversy which pitched respect for the sacred figure of Islam against the freedom of expression was the last thing it...
MUSLIM protesters threatened more terrorist attacks as they converged in their hundreds outside the Danish Embassy in London yesterday for what organisers said was the start of a new holy war in Britain. Parading banners that called for the killing of newspaper editors and broadcasters from the BBC who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, they marched across the capital from the mosque in...
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) -- Hundreds of Syrian demonstrators stormed the Danish Embassy in Damascus Saturday and set fire to the building, witnesses said. The demonstrators were protesting offensive caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammed that were first published in a Danish newspaper several months ago. Witnesses said the demonstrators set fire to the entire building, which also houses the embassies...
No serious American newspaper would commission images of Jesus that were solely designed to offend Christians. And if one did, the reaction would be swift and certain. Politicians would take to the floors of Congress and call down thunder on the malefactors. Some Christians would react with fury and boycotts and flaming e-mails that couldn't be printed in a family newspaper; others would react...
FREEDOM OF expression is not the only value at issue in the conflict provoked by a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons satirizing Islam's founding prophet, Mohammed. The billowing controversy is being swept along by intolerance, ignorance, and parochialism. The refusal of each camp to recognize and respect the otherness of the other brings closer a calamitous clash of cultures pitting Islam...
