Cartoon outrage spreads in Mideast

Published: 7:39AM Friday February 03, 2006 Source: Reuters

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Outrage spread in the Middle East on Thursday after more European newspapers published cartoons that Muslims say insult Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.
   
Tunisia and Morocco banned copies of the French tabloid France Soir, which on Wednesday reprinted cartoons originally published by Danish daily Jyllands-Posten last September. Muslims consider any images of Mohammad to be blasphemous.
   
In the Gulf state of Qatar, the Carrefour supermarket said it had stopped selling products from Denmark.
   
Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran joined the criticism of the cartoons, which have provoked widespread protests and boycotts against Denmark.
   
"Muslims should display firm reaction to such disgraceful acts," state television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying in a telephone conversation with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
   
Mubarak said freedom of the press, cited by European media and politicians, should not be an excuse for insulting religions.
   
Many Arab commentators said the European defence rang hollow because, they said, European media protected Judaism and Israel from criticism.
   
Some called for punishment of the offenders but others said Arabs had more important things to mobilise against, such as the presence of US military bases in the region.
   
"The least we have to do is boycott those who offended us by not buying their products," said influential Muslim cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi. "We thought it was only Denmark and Norway ... but several European countries and newspapers started re-printing these extremely offending pictures."
   
Newspapers in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Hungary have reprinted the caricatures this week, saying press freedom was more important than the protests and boycotts they have provoked. 
   
Deliberate provocation
   
Some Muslims, however, saw the cartoons as deliberate provocation.
   
"It's no longer a matter of freedom of thought or opinion or belief. It's a plot hatched against Islam and Muslims, the preparation of which began many years ago," former editor Samir Ragab wrote in the Egyptian state daily el-Gomhuria.
   
"If practical concerted measures are not taken, the campaign will become more ferocious," he added.
   
"They promote their hatred under the pretext of freedom of expression and turn a blind eye to the crimes that are committed in the name of Christianity and more dangerously Judaism," said columnist Mohammad Kharoub in the Jordanian daily al-Rai.
   
Saudi commentator Hussein Shobokshi, in the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, said the West had inconsistent moral criteria. "If the Danish cartoon had been about a Jewish rabbi, it would never have been published," he said.
  
But some liberal commentators questioned the wisdom of pressing an issue they saw as secondary.
   
"This active movement against the insults to the Prophet has been absent on many other issues which are no less important," Saad Hagras wrote in Egypt's Nadhet Misr.
   
"It is discouraging that the collective energy of the Muslim world is consumed punishing a small European country over a drawing, while U.S. military bases infest the heart of the Arab world," Palestinian-American Ramzy Baroud said in Egypt's English-language al-Ahram Weekly. 
   
"Too much attention"
   
As'ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese-born academic based in California, said Arab governments were inciting the campaign "to channel the political anger of their citizens".
   
"They would not dare to lead a campaign against Israel, so let them bash Denmark and Norway," he said.
   
Sami Yusuf, a British Muslim singer of Azeri origin currently touring Egypt, said the campaign gave the cartoonists and their publishers too much attention.
   
"I'm not saying turn a blind eye, but we shouldn't make too much of an issue out of it because we are giving them publicity, we're making them famous," he said.
   
The leader of Lebanon's Shi'ite Hizbollah group said the cartoonists would have thought twice if Muslims had fulfilled a 1989 edict by late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to kill Britain's Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.
   
"Had a Muslim carried out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the apostate Salman Rushdie, then those lowlifers would not have dared discredit the Prophet, not in Denmark, Norway or France," said Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.    

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