The Cartoon Row

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African court has granted a request by a Muslim group to bar publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad which have caused outrage among Muslims worldwide, an editor's group said on Saturday. The South African National Editor's Forum (SANEF) said the judge's order covered most major media companies in the country and amounted to "pre-publication censorship" by...

Sunday newspapers will not be allowed to publish a controversial cartoon of the prophet Muhammad after a Muslim pressure group was granted a court interdict. The South African National Editors Forum said on Saturday several South African media houses were gagged from publishing the cartoon on Friday night. The Jamiat-ul Ulama of Transvaal, which sought an interdict against Johncom Media and...

The cartoon drawings of the Prophet Muhammad published by various European paper recently are highly offensive, provocative and incendiary. Muslim indignation is understandable. Editorial cartoonists are often deliberately inflammatory to make a point but they find out pretty quickly if they've crossed the line - their editors are deluged with angry letters. In the case of at least one of the...

The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns the publication by a series of European newspapers of defamatory cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist and killer. These crude caricatures, intended to insult and incite Muslim sensibilities, are a political provocation. Their publication, initially by a right-wing Danish newspaper with historical ties to German and Italian...

Stalin's quip - "How many divisions has the Pope?" - is often taken for a universal truth: for all its power to describe man's nature and destiny, religion lacks the brute force to affect the world of politics and diplomacy. The uproar over caricatures of Mohammed that appeared in a Danish daily shows that the rule does not apply to Islam in quite the same way. This week's death threats, bomb...

The State Department yesterday condemned as "offensive" cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting the prophet Muhammad but defended the paper's right to publish them as a fundamental principle of democracy. It also urged Muslims, who have been staging mass protests against the cartoons and their reprinting in newspapers in Europe, to express outrage when they see anti-Christian or anti-Semitic...

The international controversy over Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad reverberated in Toronto yesterday – with hurt and sadness in the mosques and action in grocery stores. Muslim-owned groceries removed Danish products from their stores, joining a worldwide boycott stemming from publication of the cartoons. "Value is more important than business," said Hanif Kotwal, store manager at Iqbal...

News editors around the world are struggling to balance their right to free expression with respect for religious sensitivities as they debate whether to republish controversial cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. European media are defending the Danish newspaper that first published the images by reprinting them -- unleashing new rounds of fury from offended Muslims. But few media outlets in North...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The fury over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in European papers has exposed the widening cultural divide in Europe, where many Muslims are torn between their faith and the Western values of the countries they live in. The drawings, including one of the prophet wearing a turban in the form of a bomb, offended Muslims around the world and set off angry protests...

Angry demonstrations in the streets. Official protests to European governments. Boycotts of Danish goods. Death threats against journalists. Over what? Twelve cartoons in a Danish newspaper. Whether or not you agree with decision by Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, the reaction in the Islamic world has been far out of scale to any offence given. In the Gaza Strip...