Tensions rise in Mideast over Cartoons
- Thread starter Jersay
- Start date
Time for a new GOD.
The world needs a new God. The old one or one's have too much blood on their hands. Might I suggest an Inukshuk made accordingly to an image decided by the available stones for your consideration.
Durgan
The world needs a new God. The old one or one's have too much blood on their hands. Might I suggest an Inukshuk made accordingly to an image decided by the available stones for your consideration.
Durgan
I'm sorry Durgan but you have insulted my God, tell me where your embassy is, so I can burn it to the ground. :roll:
Thanks Colpy!
I'm just going to give up this whole God thing and start worshipping my computer monitor, or Oprah.
C'mon people, it's going to start soon anyway, why not get involved early?
I'm just going to give up this whole God thing and start worshipping my computer monitor, or Oprah.
C'mon people, it's going to start soon anyway, why not get involved early?
Doryman
Chin up .... good posts - I'll add my two thumbs to Colpby's....
How about we have a contest for God?
Suggestions and a democratic vote?
Or does that really work any more?
Chin up .... good posts - I'll add my two thumbs to Colpby's....
How about we have a contest for God?
Suggestions and a democratic vote?
Or does that really work any more?
As "stoopid" European nations look on with horror as their Embassies in Middle East are burnt to the groung, Britain looks on as a bemused (or should that be amused?) spectator.
No British newspaper published the cartoons. Britain is probably still mindful of the Rushdie affair - Salman Rushdie is British, and he caused a similar furore in 1989.
By the end of the week Denmark was counting the cost of freedom of speech. The prime minister’s belated but incomplete apologies had not saved Arla Foods, the country’s biggest exporter to the Middle East, from losing a market worth $500m.
Also, a Bill, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, that would have made cartoons like the Danish ones illegal in Britain was defeated - but only by one vote.
DANISH EMBASSY BURNS
The Sunday Times February 05, 2006
Focus: Freedom v faith: the firestorm
Not since the Salman Rushdie affair have secular Europe and Islam traded insults so vehemently. Stuart Wavell on the cartoons that threaten to force us apart
A small child led the religious chanting as the crowd converged on the French embassy in Damascus. They had come from the mosque where a preacher had inveighed against the “blasphemous cartoons” in Europe. It was not a wise place for a Norwegian to be.
By publishing Danish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, a Norwegian newspaper had helped to pitch Europe into the worst cultural clash between Islamic religious beliefs and western freedom of expression since Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in 1989.
Even Nord, a Norwegian visitor to the local university, was curious to see the demonstration. Reaching the embassy, those in front began to scuffle with a line of police and the crowd’s anger grew.
Then, without warning, a Syrian grabbed Nord and addressed the crowd: “This is my friend. He is a Norwegian and a good man.”
A pin’s drop could have been heard as a menacing silence came over the crowd. The Syrian then hoisted the Norwegian on to his shoulders and commanded: “Speak for your country.”
The student surveyed his hostile audience for a moment before addressing them in Arabic. “This is just an embassy,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “It is not the country. This incident is the result of lack of understanding. We need to understand each other better and then hopefully we will have the chance to live in togetherness and we can show proper respect for you. Inshallah (God willing)!” The crowd roared in approval. But the goodwill did not last: yesterday they set fire to the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish embassies.
An army of diplomats was deployed across the globe last week in vain attempts to assuage Muslim fury at the publication in Denmark and other European countries of cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad.
Initially, Britain looked on as a bemused spectator. Yet a convergence of separate events soon put the same issue in the headlines.
In Leeds the decision to bring race hate charges against Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, backfired spectacularly when a jury cleared him of two charges of inciting racial hatred against Asians by attacking the Muslim religion.
As he walked free from court surrounded by shaven-headed thugs, Griffin vowed that he would not tone down his language. “This evening, millions of people in Britain will be holding their heads a little higher,” he claimed.
Perhaps the supreme irony was the surprise Commons defeat by one vote of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which might have made the Danish cartoons illegal in Britain.
MPs could not have imagined that some of the issues raised in that debate were to spring into alarming focus within hours as Europe and Islam confronted each other in a dialogue of the deaf.
Confusingly, the dispute mutated as fast as it grew. What began as a tasteless Danish prank became a serious issue of press freedom for some newspapers. Roger Koeppel, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, the German paper which reprinted the cartoon, was in no doubt. “It’s at the very core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subjected to criticism, laughter and satire,” he said.
Others claimed that they felt compelled to show the public what the fuss was all about. Then a Jordanian paper broke ranks to print three of the cartoons and raise another uncomfortable question. “Muslims of the world be reasonable,” wrote Jihad Momani, editor of the tabloid al-Shihan. “What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures — or pictures of a hostage taker slashing the throat of his victim?” He soon received his answer: he was sacked.
Other questions clamoured. Is there a universal right to be offensive? Can speech be free if it disparages a group in society? Should a secular society bow to the dictates of an apparently implacable religion? And — principles aside — does poking fun at extremists damage or simply encourage them? The dispute had been simmering for four months. What caused the lid to blow last week?
IT began innocently with a Danish children’s book on the Koran and the prophet’s life. Its author, Kare Bluitgen, was having difficulty finding an illustrator, complaining that all the artists he approached feared the wrath of Muslims if they drew images of Muhammad. Many cited the murder of the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist as reason for refusal.
Learning of this, Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the daily Jyllands-Posten, invited anyone “bold enough” from the Danish Cartoonists’ Society to submit their entries. On September 30 Carsten Juste, the newspaper’s editor, published 12 drawings, declaring he wanted to challenge the trend for “self-censorship”.
One showed a bearded Muhammad with a bomb fizzing out of his turban. Another depicted him telling dead suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins with which to reward them. In another he is portrayed as a schoolboy with a blackboard.
To many non-Muslims the drawings might seem banal and poorly executed. But in the Islamic world the offence was palpable. Muslims across the globe observe the injunction not to display pictures of animals or humans, notably Allah’s messenger Muhammad, to prevent idolatry.
Nevertheless, the row might have died out if the Danish government had not sought to make political capital of it. Despite the ambassadors of 11 Muslim countries calling on Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister, to take “necessary steps” against the “defamation of Islam”, he refused to back down, describing the cartoons as “a necessary provocation”.
“I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press,” said Rasmussen, whose centre-right minority party is dependent for survival on support from Folkeparti, an anti-immigration party.
Muslim anger flared up again in early January when the cartoons were reprinted in Magazinet, a Christian newspaper in Norway, and on the website of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.
Last week newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland featured the cartoons. France Soir, France’s nearest thing to a “gutter press”, seemed to show particular relish in plastering its own cartoon on its front page portraying Buddha, the Christian and Jewish deities and the Prophet sitting on a cloud. The Christian God said: “Don’t complain, Muhammad, all of us have been caricatured.”
Spread across two pages inside were the 12 Danish cartoons, accompanied by a strong editorial aimed at Muslim countries’ intolerance.
“We must apologise to them,” wrote Serge Faubert, “because the freedom of expression they refuse, day after day, to each of their citizens, is exercised in a society that is not subject to their iron rule . . . No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe.”
This was strong stuff in a country still recovering from the immigrant riots in November, when 6,000 cars went up in smoke and more than 1,500 people were arrested in the space of a fortnight.
Amid violent protests in the Middle East and death threats against senior staff, the first casualty at France Soir was Jacques Lefranc, a managing editor, who was sacked by the paper’s owner, Raymond Lakah, an Egyptian-born Catholic impresario whose main business is in the Middle East.
Protests continued to intensify. In Gaza, Palestinian gunmen closed the European Union offices and gave the French, Danish, Norwegian and German governments 48 hours to apologise. French citizens were ordered to leave.
In the West Bank city of Nablus a German citizen was seized — and later released — by armed militants.
“Millions of Muslims are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet’s honour,” said Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, head of the extremist Hezbollah movement. “Had the apostate Salman Rushdie been killed then those low-lifers would not have dared to discredit the Prophet.”
NO British newspaper reprinted the cartoons, perhaps mindful of the Rushdie affair and the communal anguish that followed the London bombings last summer.
British Muslim leaders were commending editors on their “pragmatism and sobriety” on Thursday when the BBC was drawn into the row after broadcasting glimpses of the cartoons on its evening bulletins.
Channel 4 News, ITV and The Spectator magazine website also briefly showed the images. A BBC spokesman said they were shown “in full context” and “to give audiences an understanding of the strong feelings evoked by the story”.
On Thursday a small crowd of protesters shouted slogans outside the BBC’s offices in west London. The following day hundreds joined a display of fury outside the Danish embassy in the capital.
Amid calls for a holy war, they chanted: “UK go to hell, UN go to hell, Kill Denmark” and “Bin Laden is coming back”. Other banners praised the “Fab four” — the British-born suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London on July 7.
Omar Abdulla, 32, from central London said: “Anyone who insults Islam — chop their heads off. Give the perpetrators to the Muslims. If they had freedom of speech they have freedom to die.”
Such rhetoric characterised the demonstration, organised by followers of Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical preacher who now lives in Lebanon. Their press release stated that insults to Muhammad carried the death penalty, “since the Prophet said, ‘Whoever insults a prophet, kill him’ ”.
An indication of how British Muslims felt about the Danish cartoons was evident in a text and e-mail poll run by Radio 5. At one stage 58% of the responses were in favour of publishing the images, but then perplexed presenters reported an avalanche of “no” votes that exceeded 90,000.
Some Muslims said that they had received round-robin messages urging them to ring the “no” number. A woman teacher said she had not seen the images but “I felt it my duty as a Muslim to text in”.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was trying to damp down feelings. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, its secretary-general, appealed to his fellow Muslims not to be swayed by extremists who wanted to pursue “their own mischievous agenda”. He urged them to respond “peacefully and with dignity”.
However, Sacranie also demanded that the offending European newspapers should “apologise immediately” for the “gratuitously offensive” harm they had caused.
The MCB had been one of the main supporters of the government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. This was characterised by Anthony Lester, QC, a leading opponent in the Lords, as “a targeted bid to woo British Muslim support for new Labour in marginal constituencies where hostility to the illegal invasion of Iraq had alienated many Muslim and other potential voters from Labour to the Liberal Democrats”.
The MCB made no secret of the fact that its aim was largely symbolic in seeking “parity of esteem” with Jews and Sikhs who were classed in law as religious and ethnic entities. Ironically, a crucial argument came from comedians, led by Rowan Atkinson, who raised the prospect of being forbidden to poke fun at religions.
The diluted bill was stripped of measures to outlaw “abusive and insulting” language and behaviour as well as the crime of “recklessness” in actions that incite religious hatred. Sacranie described the decision as “baffling”, criticised the “mischief making” of opponents and said he thought that the cartoons would not now be classed as an offence.
BY the end of the week Denmark was counting the cost of freedom of speech. The prime minister’s belated but incomplete apologies had not saved Arla Foods, the country’s biggest exporter to the Middle East, from losing a market worth $500m.
Finn Hanssen, international director of the chain that sells Lurpak butter and Kraft cream cheese, said that the consumer boycott had “brought our total business to a standstill” in less than a week. He thought it would take months, if not years, to recover.
In Europe, too, the damage to national interests is being assessed as the uproar and denunciations have spread to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and north Africa. Nearly 30 newspapers in 13 European countries have now published the cartoons.
Meanwhile, people are trying to make sense of the incomprehending confrontation between two cultures. Ostensibly the division is between a European tradition informed by Christianity, an iconographic religion that venerates images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the saints, and its polar opposite, Islam.
Others asked where self-censorship stops when avoiding sensitive issues for the sake of a quiet life. Mockery has strong advocates. Matthew Parris wrote in The Times last week: “Structures of oppression that may not be susceptible to rational debate may in the end yield to derision.”
In Britain a pragmatic attitude has prevailed: newspapers yield to nobody in asserting their right to freedom of speech, but they saw no justification for causing deliberate offence to Muslims.
The bottom line, say some critics, is that provocation is counter-productive. It feeds the paranoia and influence of small extremist groups who can do disproportionate damage to British society in the name of the wider Muslim population, most of whom do not share their views.
“It is just a needless and pointless stoking of a raging fire that serves no one’s interests and does no one any favours,” said William Dalrymple, the author and historian. “This is an extremely sensitive moment with western troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and things are extremely uneasy in Palestine and tricky in Iran. It is not the moment to be throwing petrol on the flames.
“From every form of realpolitik it is the wrong thing to do at the wrong time and people should pull back hard.”
Reporting team: Matthew Campbell, Paris; Nicola Smith, Copenhagen; Aatish Taseer, Damascus; Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv; Michael Sheridan, Bangkok; Sarah Baxter, Washington DC; Abul Taher, Daniel Foggo, Chris Morgan, Alex Delmar-Morgan, London
BRITAIN AND BLASPHEMY, A SHORT HISTORY
John William Gott
The last Briton jailed for blasphemy, Gott was given nine months’ hard labour in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown
Gay News
Mary Whitehouse prosecuted Gay News magazine in 1977 for publishing a poem about a centurion’s love for Christ
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
This 1979 film comedy about a man mistaken for the Messiah was initially banned by some local councils in Britain
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran put a fatwa on him when his novel, which challenged aspects of Islam, came out in 1988
Bezhti and Birmingham Rep
In 2004 the theatre was forced to withdraw the play after violent protests by Sikhs
Jerry Springer - The Opera
Christian groups threatened the BBC with a private blasphemy prosecution last year after it screened Jerry Springer - The Opera.
THEY SHOULD HAVE PUBLISHED ... THEY SHOULDN'T ... HOW THE WORLD DIVIDES ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
Haji Mustafa, spokesman for Hizb-ut-Tahrir
Publishing pictures of the Prophet was simply designed to provoke Muslims. This is all part of the war on terror. After the invasion of Muslim lands and the desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo Bay, you have this, an attack on the Prophet. Surely the mark of a civilised country is that there is civility and respect. This is a mark of intolerance.
Christopher Hitchens, writer and commentator
There isn’t an inch to give, nothing to negotiate and no concessions to offer. Those of us who believe in enlightenment and free speech also have unalterable principles which we will not give up. We have to listen all the time to piratical-looking mullahs calling our Jewish friends pigs and demanding the censorship of The Satanic Verses and we find this fantastically insulting, but we don’t behave like babies. They are making a puerile spectacle of themselves.
We should say, how dare you behave in this way? They can put themselves under laws and taboos if they wish, but it is nothing to do with me or anybody else. They are completely out of order.
Basil Mustafa, lecturer in Islamic studies, Oxford
These cartoons are a form of western arrogance — anyone you don’t like, you can ridicule them, abuse them. I am not sure if Christ has been ridiculed in the same way in films in the West. There have been films about him, but not ridiculing him. The reason why Muhammad was ridiculed was because he was a Muslim prophet.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty
We say to Britain’s Muslims in friendship and solidarity — let’s close Guantanamo and end torture flights before we worry about distasteful cartoons. Shutting down free expression is particularly dangerous for minorities. How can my speech be free if yours is so expensive?
Ibrahim Mogra, leading British imam
I don’t think freedom of speech should be used to hurt Muslims and vilify Muhammad. To depict him as a terrorist, it does not do any good. What message does it give out — that all Muslims are terrorists?
Munira Mirza, British writer of Muslim origin
British newspapers should have published the cartoons. By failing to publish, they are saying that it’s acceptable to self-censor, we don’t want to rock the boat. I know lots of people who will be offended by the pictures but Muslims should be treated equally, like everybody else.
Muslims are not the only communities hurt by images. Many minority groups have this culture of victimhood and often perception is not based on reality. I think everything should be allowed to be ridiculed. Through humour, lots of European countries have managed to overcome the strict regimes imposed on them by the church.
Everybody says Islam should be reformed, but you can’t have this if there is no discussion, no debate.
Roger Scruton, philosopher
You must respect other people’s pieties and that means respecting the icons of their faith and the rituals, but that doesn’t mean you can’t criticise the content of the faith.
What we need is more discussion and less mockery. We Christians have had to put up with the most appalling satire of our symbols — it’s the way the world works. I don’t think the Danish cartoons are anything to get as worked up about as all that but I think it’s wrong to publish them.
Ziauddin Sardar, writer and broadcaster
This is not an issue of freedom of expression, it is very much an issue of power. In Britain, Muslims are in a good position and are capable of representing themselves, but in Europe they are marginalised and do not have the means to reply.
If you use your freedom of expression to denigrate and abuse, knowing they have no way of responding, then it is an act of oppression.
It is an act of banality and we are moving towards a “banality of evil”. The demonisation of Muslims is like the demonisation of Jews that led to the Holocaust and there is a similar swing to the right occurring now in Europe.
I have travelled in Holland, Belgium, France and Germany and have been horrified by the open hatred of Muslims in those countries. What this kind of exercise does is to confirm people’s belief about Muslims, that they are right to hate them and the next stage, which is one of violence, is implicit.
Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford
Those newspapers which decided not to publish cartoons of the Prophet acted wisely and in the public good. Freedom of speech is fundamental to our society and all religions need to be open to criticism, but this freedom needs to be exercised responsibly with a sensitivity to cultural differences.
Arnaud Levy, editor in chief of France Soir
It isn’t the cartoons themselves that we’re defending, it’s the right of a newspaper — Danish, as it happens, but it could be French, German, Italian, Belgian or Zimbabwean — to publish them without being threatened and without provoking condemnation.
Wadah Khanfar, director of Al-Jazeera TV
It is an insult for one billion Muslims. We profoundly respect freedom of expression but these images do not give any information or deliver any opinion. They are purely insulting.
thetimesonline.co.uk
No British newspaper published the cartoons. Britain is probably still mindful of the Rushdie affair - Salman Rushdie is British, and he caused a similar furore in 1989.
By the end of the week Denmark was counting the cost of freedom of speech. The prime minister’s belated but incomplete apologies had not saved Arla Foods, the country’s biggest exporter to the Middle East, from losing a market worth $500m.
Also, a Bill, the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, that would have made cartoons like the Danish ones illegal in Britain was defeated - but only by one vote.
DANISH EMBASSY BURNS
The Sunday Times February 05, 2006
Focus: Freedom v faith: the firestorm
Not since the Salman Rushdie affair have secular Europe and Islam traded insults so vehemently. Stuart Wavell on the cartoons that threaten to force us apart
A small child led the religious chanting as the crowd converged on the French embassy in Damascus. They had come from the mosque where a preacher had inveighed against the “blasphemous cartoons” in Europe. It was not a wise place for a Norwegian to be.
By publishing Danish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, a Norwegian newspaper had helped to pitch Europe into the worst cultural clash between Islamic religious beliefs and western freedom of expression since Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in 1989.
Even Nord, a Norwegian visitor to the local university, was curious to see the demonstration. Reaching the embassy, those in front began to scuffle with a line of police and the crowd’s anger grew.
Then, without warning, a Syrian grabbed Nord and addressed the crowd: “This is my friend. He is a Norwegian and a good man.”
A pin’s drop could have been heard as a menacing silence came over the crowd. The Syrian then hoisted the Norwegian on to his shoulders and commanded: “Speak for your country.”
The student surveyed his hostile audience for a moment before addressing them in Arabic. “This is just an embassy,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “It is not the country. This incident is the result of lack of understanding. We need to understand each other better and then hopefully we will have the chance to live in togetherness and we can show proper respect for you. Inshallah (God willing)!” The crowd roared in approval. But the goodwill did not last: yesterday they set fire to the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish embassies.
An army of diplomats was deployed across the globe last week in vain attempts to assuage Muslim fury at the publication in Denmark and other European countries of cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad.
Initially, Britain looked on as a bemused spectator. Yet a convergence of separate events soon put the same issue in the headlines.
In Leeds the decision to bring race hate charges against Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, backfired spectacularly when a jury cleared him of two charges of inciting racial hatred against Asians by attacking the Muslim religion.
As he walked free from court surrounded by shaven-headed thugs, Griffin vowed that he would not tone down his language. “This evening, millions of people in Britain will be holding their heads a little higher,” he claimed.
Perhaps the supreme irony was the surprise Commons defeat by one vote of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which might have made the Danish cartoons illegal in Britain.
MPs could not have imagined that some of the issues raised in that debate were to spring into alarming focus within hours as Europe and Islam confronted each other in a dialogue of the deaf.
Confusingly, the dispute mutated as fast as it grew. What began as a tasteless Danish prank became a serious issue of press freedom for some newspapers. Roger Koeppel, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, the German paper which reprinted the cartoon, was in no doubt. “It’s at the very core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subjected to criticism, laughter and satire,” he said.
Others claimed that they felt compelled to show the public what the fuss was all about. Then a Jordanian paper broke ranks to print three of the cartoons and raise another uncomfortable question. “Muslims of the world be reasonable,” wrote Jihad Momani, editor of the tabloid al-Shihan. “What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures — or pictures of a hostage taker slashing the throat of his victim?” He soon received his answer: he was sacked.
Other questions clamoured. Is there a universal right to be offensive? Can speech be free if it disparages a group in society? Should a secular society bow to the dictates of an apparently implacable religion? And — principles aside — does poking fun at extremists damage or simply encourage them? The dispute had been simmering for four months. What caused the lid to blow last week?
IT began innocently with a Danish children’s book on the Koran and the prophet’s life. Its author, Kare Bluitgen, was having difficulty finding an illustrator, complaining that all the artists he approached feared the wrath of Muslims if they drew images of Muhammad. Many cited the murder of the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist as reason for refusal.
Learning of this, Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the daily Jyllands-Posten, invited anyone “bold enough” from the Danish Cartoonists’ Society to submit their entries. On September 30 Carsten Juste, the newspaper’s editor, published 12 drawings, declaring he wanted to challenge the trend for “self-censorship”.
One showed a bearded Muhammad with a bomb fizzing out of his turban. Another depicted him telling dead suicide bombers that he had run out of virgins with which to reward them. In another he is portrayed as a schoolboy with a blackboard.
To many non-Muslims the drawings might seem banal and poorly executed. But in the Islamic world the offence was palpable. Muslims across the globe observe the injunction not to display pictures of animals or humans, notably Allah’s messenger Muhammad, to prevent idolatry.
Nevertheless, the row might have died out if the Danish government had not sought to make political capital of it. Despite the ambassadors of 11 Muslim countries calling on Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister, to take “necessary steps” against the “defamation of Islam”, he refused to back down, describing the cartoons as “a necessary provocation”.
“I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press,” said Rasmussen, whose centre-right minority party is dependent for survival on support from Folkeparti, an anti-immigration party.
Muslim anger flared up again in early January when the cartoons were reprinted in Magazinet, a Christian newspaper in Norway, and on the website of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.
Last week newspapers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland featured the cartoons. France Soir, France’s nearest thing to a “gutter press”, seemed to show particular relish in plastering its own cartoon on its front page portraying Buddha, the Christian and Jewish deities and the Prophet sitting on a cloud. The Christian God said: “Don’t complain, Muhammad, all of us have been caricatured.”
Spread across two pages inside were the 12 Danish cartoons, accompanied by a strong editorial aimed at Muslim countries’ intolerance.
“We must apologise to them,” wrote Serge Faubert, “because the freedom of expression they refuse, day after day, to each of their citizens, is exercised in a society that is not subject to their iron rule . . . No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe.”
This was strong stuff in a country still recovering from the immigrant riots in November, when 6,000 cars went up in smoke and more than 1,500 people were arrested in the space of a fortnight.
Amid violent protests in the Middle East and death threats against senior staff, the first casualty at France Soir was Jacques Lefranc, a managing editor, who was sacked by the paper’s owner, Raymond Lakah, an Egyptian-born Catholic impresario whose main business is in the Middle East.
Protests continued to intensify. In Gaza, Palestinian gunmen closed the European Union offices and gave the French, Danish, Norwegian and German governments 48 hours to apologise. French citizens were ordered to leave.
In the West Bank city of Nablus a German citizen was seized — and later released — by armed militants.
“Millions of Muslims are ready to give their lives to defend our prophet’s honour,” said Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, head of the extremist Hezbollah movement. “Had the apostate Salman Rushdie been killed then those low-lifers would not have dared to discredit the Prophet.”
NO British newspaper reprinted the cartoons, perhaps mindful of the Rushdie affair and the communal anguish that followed the London bombings last summer.
British Muslim leaders were commending editors on their “pragmatism and sobriety” on Thursday when the BBC was drawn into the row after broadcasting glimpses of the cartoons on its evening bulletins.
Channel 4 News, ITV and The Spectator magazine website also briefly showed the images. A BBC spokesman said they were shown “in full context” and “to give audiences an understanding of the strong feelings evoked by the story”.
On Thursday a small crowd of protesters shouted slogans outside the BBC’s offices in west London. The following day hundreds joined a display of fury outside the Danish embassy in the capital.
Amid calls for a holy war, they chanted: “UK go to hell, UN go to hell, Kill Denmark” and “Bin Laden is coming back”. Other banners praised the “Fab four” — the British-born suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London on July 7.
Omar Abdulla, 32, from central London said: “Anyone who insults Islam — chop their heads off. Give the perpetrators to the Muslims. If they had freedom of speech they have freedom to die.”
Such rhetoric characterised the demonstration, organised by followers of Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical preacher who now lives in Lebanon. Their press release stated that insults to Muhammad carried the death penalty, “since the Prophet said, ‘Whoever insults a prophet, kill him’ ”.
An indication of how British Muslims felt about the Danish cartoons was evident in a text and e-mail poll run by Radio 5. At one stage 58% of the responses were in favour of publishing the images, but then perplexed presenters reported an avalanche of “no” votes that exceeded 90,000.
Some Muslims said that they had received round-robin messages urging them to ring the “no” number. A woman teacher said she had not seen the images but “I felt it my duty as a Muslim to text in”.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was trying to damp down feelings. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, its secretary-general, appealed to his fellow Muslims not to be swayed by extremists who wanted to pursue “their own mischievous agenda”. He urged them to respond “peacefully and with dignity”.
However, Sacranie also demanded that the offending European newspapers should “apologise immediately” for the “gratuitously offensive” harm they had caused.
The MCB had been one of the main supporters of the government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. This was characterised by Anthony Lester, QC, a leading opponent in the Lords, as “a targeted bid to woo British Muslim support for new Labour in marginal constituencies where hostility to the illegal invasion of Iraq had alienated many Muslim and other potential voters from Labour to the Liberal Democrats”.
The MCB made no secret of the fact that its aim was largely symbolic in seeking “parity of esteem” with Jews and Sikhs who were classed in law as religious and ethnic entities. Ironically, a crucial argument came from comedians, led by Rowan Atkinson, who raised the prospect of being forbidden to poke fun at religions.
The diluted bill was stripped of measures to outlaw “abusive and insulting” language and behaviour as well as the crime of “recklessness” in actions that incite religious hatred. Sacranie described the decision as “baffling”, criticised the “mischief making” of opponents and said he thought that the cartoons would not now be classed as an offence.
BY the end of the week Denmark was counting the cost of freedom of speech. The prime minister’s belated but incomplete apologies had not saved Arla Foods, the country’s biggest exporter to the Middle East, from losing a market worth $500m.
Finn Hanssen, international director of the chain that sells Lurpak butter and Kraft cream cheese, said that the consumer boycott had “brought our total business to a standstill” in less than a week. He thought it would take months, if not years, to recover.
In Europe, too, the damage to national interests is being assessed as the uproar and denunciations have spread to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and north Africa. Nearly 30 newspapers in 13 European countries have now published the cartoons.
Meanwhile, people are trying to make sense of the incomprehending confrontation between two cultures. Ostensibly the division is between a European tradition informed by Christianity, an iconographic religion that venerates images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the saints, and its polar opposite, Islam.
Others asked where self-censorship stops when avoiding sensitive issues for the sake of a quiet life. Mockery has strong advocates. Matthew Parris wrote in The Times last week: “Structures of oppression that may not be susceptible to rational debate may in the end yield to derision.”
In Britain a pragmatic attitude has prevailed: newspapers yield to nobody in asserting their right to freedom of speech, but they saw no justification for causing deliberate offence to Muslims.
The bottom line, say some critics, is that provocation is counter-productive. It feeds the paranoia and influence of small extremist groups who can do disproportionate damage to British society in the name of the wider Muslim population, most of whom do not share their views.
“It is just a needless and pointless stoking of a raging fire that serves no one’s interests and does no one any favours,” said William Dalrymple, the author and historian. “This is an extremely sensitive moment with western troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and things are extremely uneasy in Palestine and tricky in Iran. It is not the moment to be throwing petrol on the flames.
“From every form of realpolitik it is the wrong thing to do at the wrong time and people should pull back hard.”
Reporting team: Matthew Campbell, Paris; Nicola Smith, Copenhagen; Aatish Taseer, Damascus; Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv; Michael Sheridan, Bangkok; Sarah Baxter, Washington DC; Abul Taher, Daniel Foggo, Chris Morgan, Alex Delmar-Morgan, London
BRITAIN AND BLASPHEMY, A SHORT HISTORY
John William Gott
The last Briton jailed for blasphemy, Gott was given nine months’ hard labour in 1922 for comparing Jesus to a circus clown
Gay News
Mary Whitehouse prosecuted Gay News magazine in 1977 for publishing a poem about a centurion’s love for Christ
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
This 1979 film comedy about a man mistaken for the Messiah was initially banned by some local councils in Britain
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran put a fatwa on him when his novel, which challenged aspects of Islam, came out in 1988
Bezhti and Birmingham Rep
In 2004 the theatre was forced to withdraw the play after violent protests by Sikhs
Jerry Springer - The Opera
Christian groups threatened the BBC with a private blasphemy prosecution last year after it screened Jerry Springer - The Opera.
THEY SHOULD HAVE PUBLISHED ... THEY SHOULDN'T ... HOW THE WORLD DIVIDES ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
Haji Mustafa, spokesman for Hizb-ut-Tahrir
Publishing pictures of the Prophet was simply designed to provoke Muslims. This is all part of the war on terror. After the invasion of Muslim lands and the desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo Bay, you have this, an attack on the Prophet. Surely the mark of a civilised country is that there is civility and respect. This is a mark of intolerance.
Christopher Hitchens, writer and commentator
There isn’t an inch to give, nothing to negotiate and no concessions to offer. Those of us who believe in enlightenment and free speech also have unalterable principles which we will not give up. We have to listen all the time to piratical-looking mullahs calling our Jewish friends pigs and demanding the censorship of The Satanic Verses and we find this fantastically insulting, but we don’t behave like babies. They are making a puerile spectacle of themselves.
We should say, how dare you behave in this way? They can put themselves under laws and taboos if they wish, but it is nothing to do with me or anybody else. They are completely out of order.
Basil Mustafa, lecturer in Islamic studies, Oxford
These cartoons are a form of western arrogance — anyone you don’t like, you can ridicule them, abuse them. I am not sure if Christ has been ridiculed in the same way in films in the West. There have been films about him, but not ridiculing him. The reason why Muhammad was ridiculed was because he was a Muslim prophet.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty
We say to Britain’s Muslims in friendship and solidarity — let’s close Guantanamo and end torture flights before we worry about distasteful cartoons. Shutting down free expression is particularly dangerous for minorities. How can my speech be free if yours is so expensive?
Ibrahim Mogra, leading British imam
I don’t think freedom of speech should be used to hurt Muslims and vilify Muhammad. To depict him as a terrorist, it does not do any good. What message does it give out — that all Muslims are terrorists?
Munira Mirza, British writer of Muslim origin
British newspapers should have published the cartoons. By failing to publish, they are saying that it’s acceptable to self-censor, we don’t want to rock the boat. I know lots of people who will be offended by the pictures but Muslims should be treated equally, like everybody else.
Muslims are not the only communities hurt by images. Many minority groups have this culture of victimhood and often perception is not based on reality. I think everything should be allowed to be ridiculed. Through humour, lots of European countries have managed to overcome the strict regimes imposed on them by the church.
Everybody says Islam should be reformed, but you can’t have this if there is no discussion, no debate.
Roger Scruton, philosopher
You must respect other people’s pieties and that means respecting the icons of their faith and the rituals, but that doesn’t mean you can’t criticise the content of the faith.
What we need is more discussion and less mockery. We Christians have had to put up with the most appalling satire of our symbols — it’s the way the world works. I don’t think the Danish cartoons are anything to get as worked up about as all that but I think it’s wrong to publish them.
Ziauddin Sardar, writer and broadcaster
This is not an issue of freedom of expression, it is very much an issue of power. In Britain, Muslims are in a good position and are capable of representing themselves, but in Europe they are marginalised and do not have the means to reply.
If you use your freedom of expression to denigrate and abuse, knowing they have no way of responding, then it is an act of oppression.
It is an act of banality and we are moving towards a “banality of evil”. The demonisation of Muslims is like the demonisation of Jews that led to the Holocaust and there is a similar swing to the right occurring now in Europe.
I have travelled in Holland, Belgium, France and Germany and have been horrified by the open hatred of Muslims in those countries. What this kind of exercise does is to confirm people’s belief about Muslims, that they are right to hate them and the next stage, which is one of violence, is implicit.
Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford
Those newspapers which decided not to publish cartoons of the Prophet acted wisely and in the public good. Freedom of speech is fundamental to our society and all religions need to be open to criticism, but this freedom needs to be exercised responsibly with a sensitivity to cultural differences.
Arnaud Levy, editor in chief of France Soir
It isn’t the cartoons themselves that we’re defending, it’s the right of a newspaper — Danish, as it happens, but it could be French, German, Italian, Belgian or Zimbabwean — to publish them without being threatened and without provoking condemnation.
Wadah Khanfar, director of Al-Jazeera TV
It is an insult for one billion Muslims. We profoundly respect freedom of expression but these images do not give any information or deliver any opinion. They are purely insulting.
thetimesonline.co.uk
I'm fed up of people saying: "What's wrong with publishing these cartoons? It's free speech?"
Yeah? So what happened to free speech a few weeks ago when a British author was locked up in an Austrian jail for denying the Holocaust? Doesn't Austria have free speech, or was he locked up because denying the Holocaust is offensive? If a British newspaper published an article saying that the Holocaust never happened, would Europeans and Americans not bother, saying that it's free speech? Or would they want the newspaper to apologise? Maybe Europeans and Americans and Canadians would riot in the streets and burn BRITISH embassies. So publishing these cartoons of Muhammad is a similar thing. If a Brit gets locked up in Austria for denying the Holocaust, despite the fact that he has freedom of speech, then surely the Danes and other Europeans were wrong in publishing these cartoons?
We have free speech in Britain, but would we publish photos of the dead bodies of British soldiers in Iraq? No. We have freedom of speech, but we don't go overboard and say that EVERYTHING can be published.
The British were right in not showing them. We'll show the world how sensible and mature we are and how we value, not denigrate, free speech.
The Sunday Times February 05, 2006
These cartoons don't defend free speech, they threaten it. British newspapers did the right thing by not showing them.
Simon Jenkins
I think, therefore I am, said the philosopher. Fine. But I think, therefore I speak? No way.
Nobody has an absolute right to freedom. Civilisation is the story of humans sacrificing freedom so as to live together in harmony. We do not need Hobbes to tell us that absolute freedom is for newborn savages. All else is compromise.
Should a right-wing Danish newspaper have carried the derisive images of Muhammad? No. Should other newspapers have repeated them and the BBC teasingly “flashed” them to prove its free-speech virility?
No. Should governments apologise for them or ban them from repeating the offence? No, but that is not the issue.
A newspaper is not a monastery, its mind blind to the world and deaf to reaction. Every inch of published print reflects the views of its writers and the judgment of its editors. Every day newspapers decide on the balance of boldness, offence, taste, discretion and recklessness. They must decide who is to be allowed a voice and who not. They are curbed by libel laws, common decency and their own sense of what is acceptable to readers. Speech is free only on a mountain top; all else is editing.
Despite Britons’ robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust (despite the fact we have free speech). Pictures of bodies are not carried if they are likely to be seen by family members (even though we have free speech.) Privacy and dignity are respected, even if such restraint is usually unknown to readers. Over every page hovers a censor, even if he is graced with the title of editor.
To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists to demand “Europe-wide solidarity” in the cause of free speech and to deride those who are offended as “fundamentalists . . . who have a problem with the entire western world” comes close to racial provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve initiation by religious insult.
Many people seem surprised that a multicultural crunch should have come over religion rather than race. Most incoming migrants from the Muslim world are in search of work and security. They have accepted racial discrimination and cultural subordination as the price of admission. Most Europeans, however surreptitiously, regard that subordination as reasonable.
What Muslims did not expect was that admission also required them to tolerate the ridicule of their faith and guilt by association with its wildest and most violent followers in the Middle East. Islam is an ancient and dignified religion. Like Christianity its teaching can be variously interpreted and used for bloodthirsty ends, but in itself Islam has purity and simplicity. Part of that purity lies in its abstraction and part of that abstraction is an aversion to icons.
The Danes must have known that a depiction of Allah as human or the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist would outrage Muslims. It is plain dumb to claim such blasphemy as just a joke concordant with the western way of life. Better claim it as intentionally savage, since that was how it was bound to seem. To adapt Shakespeare, what to a Christian “is but a choleric word”, to a Muslim is flat blasphemy.
Of all the casualties of globalism, religious sensibility is the most hurtful. I once noticed in Baghdad airport an otherwise respectable Iraqi woman go completely hysterical when an American guard set his sniffer dog, an “unclean” animal, on her copy of the Koran. The soldier swore at her: “Oh for Christ’s sake, shut up!” She was baffled that he cited Christ in defence of what he had done.
Likewise, to an American or British soldier, forcibly entering the women’s quarters of an Arab house at night is normal peacekeeping. To an Arab it is abhorrent, way beyond any pale. Nor do Muslims understand the West’s excusing such actions, as does Tony Blair, by comparing them favourably with those of Saddam Hussein, as if Saddam were the benchmark of international behaviour.
It is clearly hard for westerners to comprehend the dismay these gestures cause Muslims. The question is not whether Muslims should or should not “grow up” or respect freedom of speech. It is whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own. The demand by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja. That causing religious offence should be regarded a sign of western machismo is obscene.
The traditional balance between free speech and respect for the feelings of others is evidently becoming harder to sustain. The resulting turbulence can only feed the propaganda of the right to attack or expel immigrants and those of alien culture. And it can only feed the appetite of government to restrain free speech where it really matters, as in criticising itself.
There is little doubt that had the Home Office’s original version of its religious hatred bill been enacted, publishing the cartoons would in Britain have been illegal. There was no need to prove intent to cause religious hatred, only “recklessness”. Even as amended by parliament the bill might allow a prosecution to portray the cartoons as insulting and abusive and to dismiss the allowed defence that the intention was to attack ideas rather than people.
The same zest for broad-sweep censorship was shown in Charles Clarke’s last anti-terrorism bill. Its bid (again curbed by parliament) was to outlaw the “negligent”, even if unintended, glorification of terrorism. It wanted to outlaw those whose utterances might have celebrated or glorified a violent change of government, whether or not they meant to do so. Clarke proposed to list “under order” those historical figures he regarded as terrorists and those he decided were “freedom fighters”. The latter, he intimated, might include Irish ones. This was historical censorship of truly Stalinist ambition. By such men are we now ruled.
That a modern home secretary should seek such powers illustrates the danger to which a collapse of media self-restraint might lead. Last week there were demands from some (not all) Muslim leaders for governments to “apologise” for the cartoons and somehow forbid their dissemination. It was a demand that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, commendably rejected. It assumed that governments had in some sense allowed the cartoons and were thus in a position to atone for them. Many governments might be happy to fall into this trap and seek to control deeds for which they may have to apologise. The glib assumption of blame where none exists feeds ministerial folie de grandeur, as with Blair’s ludicrous 1997 apology for the Irish potato famine.
In all matters of self-regulation the danger is clear. If important institutions, in this case the press, will not practise self-discipline then governments will practise it for them. Ascribing evil consequences to religious faith is a sure way of causing offence. Banning such offence is an equally sure way for a politician to curry favour with a minority and thus advance the authoritarian tendency. The present Home Office needs no such encouragement.
Offending an opponent has long been a feature of polemics, just as challenging the boundaries of taste has been a feature of art. It is rightly surrounded by legal and ethical palisades. These include the laws of libel and slander and concepts such as fair comment, right of reply and not stirring racial hatred. None of them is absolute. All rely on the exercise of judgment by those in positions of power. All rely on that bulwark of democracy, tolerance of the feelings of others. This was encapsulated by Lord Clark in his defining quality of civilisation: courtesy.
Too many politicians would rather not trust the self-restraint of others and would take the power of restraint onto themselves. Recent British legislation shows that a censor is waiting round every corner. This past week must have sent his hopes soaring because of the idiot antics of a few continental journalists.
The best defence of free speech can only be to curb its excess and respect its courtesy.
thetimesonline.co.uk
Yeah? So what happened to free speech a few weeks ago when a British author was locked up in an Austrian jail for denying the Holocaust? Doesn't Austria have free speech, or was he locked up because denying the Holocaust is offensive? If a British newspaper published an article saying that the Holocaust never happened, would Europeans and Americans not bother, saying that it's free speech? Or would they want the newspaper to apologise? Maybe Europeans and Americans and Canadians would riot in the streets and burn BRITISH embassies. So publishing these cartoons of Muhammad is a similar thing. If a Brit gets locked up in Austria for denying the Holocaust, despite the fact that he has freedom of speech, then surely the Danes and other Europeans were wrong in publishing these cartoons?
We have free speech in Britain, but would we publish photos of the dead bodies of British soldiers in Iraq? No. We have freedom of speech, but we don't go overboard and say that EVERYTHING can be published.
The British were right in not showing them. We'll show the world how sensible and mature we are and how we value, not denigrate, free speech.
The Sunday Times February 05, 2006
These cartoons don't defend free speech, they threaten it. British newspapers did the right thing by not showing them.
Simon Jenkins
I think, therefore I am, said the philosopher. Fine. But I think, therefore I speak? No way.
Nobody has an absolute right to freedom. Civilisation is the story of humans sacrificing freedom so as to live together in harmony. We do not need Hobbes to tell us that absolute freedom is for newborn savages. All else is compromise.
Should a right-wing Danish newspaper have carried the derisive images of Muhammad? No. Should other newspapers have repeated them and the BBC teasingly “flashed” them to prove its free-speech virility?
No. Should governments apologise for them or ban them from repeating the offence? No, but that is not the issue.
A newspaper is not a monastery, its mind blind to the world and deaf to reaction. Every inch of published print reflects the views of its writers and the judgment of its editors. Every day newspapers decide on the balance of boldness, offence, taste, discretion and recklessness. They must decide who is to be allowed a voice and who not. They are curbed by libel laws, common decency and their own sense of what is acceptable to readers. Speech is free only on a mountain top; all else is editing.
Despite Britons’ robust attitude to religion, no newspaper would let a cartoonist depict Jesus Christ dropping cluster bombs, or lampoon the Holocaust (despite the fact we have free speech). Pictures of bodies are not carried if they are likely to be seen by family members (even though we have free speech.) Privacy and dignity are respected, even if such restraint is usually unknown to readers. Over every page hovers a censor, even if he is graced with the title of editor.
To imply that some great issue of censorship is raised by the Danish cartoons is nonsense. They were offensive and inflammatory. The best policy would have been to apologise and shut up. For Danish journalists to demand “Europe-wide solidarity” in the cause of free speech and to deride those who are offended as “fundamentalists . . . who have a problem with the entire western world” comes close to racial provocation. We do not go about punching people in the face to test their commitment to non-violence. To be a European should not involve initiation by religious insult.
Many people seem surprised that a multicultural crunch should have come over religion rather than race. Most incoming migrants from the Muslim world are in search of work and security. They have accepted racial discrimination and cultural subordination as the price of admission. Most Europeans, however surreptitiously, regard that subordination as reasonable.
What Muslims did not expect was that admission also required them to tolerate the ridicule of their faith and guilt by association with its wildest and most violent followers in the Middle East. Islam is an ancient and dignified religion. Like Christianity its teaching can be variously interpreted and used for bloodthirsty ends, but in itself Islam has purity and simplicity. Part of that purity lies in its abstraction and part of that abstraction is an aversion to icons.
The Danes must have known that a depiction of Allah as human or the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist would outrage Muslims. It is plain dumb to claim such blasphemy as just a joke concordant with the western way of life. Better claim it as intentionally savage, since that was how it was bound to seem. To adapt Shakespeare, what to a Christian “is but a choleric word”, to a Muslim is flat blasphemy.
Of all the casualties of globalism, religious sensibility is the most hurtful. I once noticed in Baghdad airport an otherwise respectable Iraqi woman go completely hysterical when an American guard set his sniffer dog, an “unclean” animal, on her copy of the Koran. The soldier swore at her: “Oh for Christ’s sake, shut up!” She was baffled that he cited Christ in defence of what he had done.
Likewise, to an American or British soldier, forcibly entering the women’s quarters of an Arab house at night is normal peacekeeping. To an Arab it is abhorrent, way beyond any pale. Nor do Muslims understand the West’s excusing such actions, as does Tony Blair, by comparing them favourably with those of Saddam Hussein, as if Saddam were the benchmark of international behaviour.
It is clearly hard for westerners to comprehend the dismay these gestures cause Muslims. The question is not whether Muslims should or should not “grow up” or respect freedom of speech. It is whether we truly want to share a world in peace with those who have values and religious beliefs different from our own. The demand by foreign journalists that British newspapers compound their offence shows that moral arrogance is as alive in the editing rooms of northern Europe as in the streets of Falluja. That causing religious offence should be regarded a sign of western machismo is obscene.
The traditional balance between free speech and respect for the feelings of others is evidently becoming harder to sustain. The resulting turbulence can only feed the propaganda of the right to attack or expel immigrants and those of alien culture. And it can only feed the appetite of government to restrain free speech where it really matters, as in criticising itself.
There is little doubt that had the Home Office’s original version of its religious hatred bill been enacted, publishing the cartoons would in Britain have been illegal. There was no need to prove intent to cause religious hatred, only “recklessness”. Even as amended by parliament the bill might allow a prosecution to portray the cartoons as insulting and abusive and to dismiss the allowed defence that the intention was to attack ideas rather than people.
The same zest for broad-sweep censorship was shown in Charles Clarke’s last anti-terrorism bill. Its bid (again curbed by parliament) was to outlaw the “negligent”, even if unintended, glorification of terrorism. It wanted to outlaw those whose utterances might have celebrated or glorified a violent change of government, whether or not they meant to do so. Clarke proposed to list “under order” those historical figures he regarded as terrorists and those he decided were “freedom fighters”. The latter, he intimated, might include Irish ones. This was historical censorship of truly Stalinist ambition. By such men are we now ruled.
That a modern home secretary should seek such powers illustrates the danger to which a collapse of media self-restraint might lead. Last week there were demands from some (not all) Muslim leaders for governments to “apologise” for the cartoons and somehow forbid their dissemination. It was a demand that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, commendably rejected. It assumed that governments had in some sense allowed the cartoons and were thus in a position to atone for them. Many governments might be happy to fall into this trap and seek to control deeds for which they may have to apologise. The glib assumption of blame where none exists feeds ministerial folie de grandeur, as with Blair’s ludicrous 1997 apology for the Irish potato famine.
In all matters of self-regulation the danger is clear. If important institutions, in this case the press, will not practise self-discipline then governments will practise it for them. Ascribing evil consequences to religious faith is a sure way of causing offence. Banning such offence is an equally sure way for a politician to curry favour with a minority and thus advance the authoritarian tendency. The present Home Office needs no such encouragement.
Offending an opponent has long been a feature of polemics, just as challenging the boundaries of taste has been a feature of art. It is rightly surrounded by legal and ethical palisades. These include the laws of libel and slander and concepts such as fair comment, right of reply and not stirring racial hatred. None of them is absolute. All rely on the exercise of judgment by those in positions of power. All rely on that bulwark of democracy, tolerance of the feelings of others. This was encapsulated by Lord Clark in his defining quality of civilisation: courtesy.
Too many politicians would rather not trust the self-restraint of others and would take the power of restraint onto themselves. Recent British legislation shows that a censor is waiting round every corner. This past week must have sent his hopes soaring because of the idiot antics of a few continental journalists.
The best defence of free speech can only be to curb its excess and respect its courtesy.
thetimesonline.co.uk
After seeing the cartoons in question,have come to the conclusion that they are not very well done and simplistic in their images.. so, I am not offended, but merely amazed by the furor over them 
Publishing the cartoons in Newspapers is redundant. They are displayed all over the internet.
People may serearch for offence in anything. Those cartoons with one exception;namely, the one with Mohammed's name at the side of the turban bomb could be taken for any person, who wears a turban.
Now just watch the cartoons fly all over the world. They will not flatter Moslems, with some justification.
The only outcome was to expose to the world was just how intolerant the Moslem world are in practice. At one time I had a certain amount of empathy for some of their grievances. Now I comdemn them completely without reservation.
Durgan.
People may serearch for offence in anything. Those cartoons with one exception;namely, the one with Mohammed's name at the side of the turban bomb could be taken for any person, who wears a turban.
Now just watch the cartoons fly all over the world. They will not flatter Moslems, with some justification.
The only outcome was to expose to the world was just how intolerant the Moslem world are in practice. At one time I had a certain amount of empathy for some of their grievances. Now I comdemn them completely without reservation.
Durgan.
I was thinking that our religious leaders would love to have the power of the Muslims..just imagine what falwell and robertson and the Pope could foment if we followed them as blindly as they would like.
Really this is what Christianity was like in the dark ages. 500 ad-1500 ad in Europe. So well the mind set of these people. Well...
Yeah and burning Diplomatic missions over a f*cking cartoon by a private newspaper!!!! f*cking dumb asses!
This isn't just in Europe, this is also in Canada, I've seen reports of Moslum store owners pulling Danish products from the shelves.
I'm sick of people who don't even understand there own religion, puplic life and private life.
freaken backwards!
Yeah and burning Diplomatic missions over a f*cking cartoon by a private newspaper!!!! f*cking dumb asses!
This isn't just in Europe, this is also in Canada, I've seen reports of Moslum store owners pulling Danish products from the shelves.
I'm sick of people who don't even understand there own religion, puplic life and private life.
freaken backwards!
Fanatics don't need logic to terrorize - but the cartoons have given them what they believe to be a reason to set off more fear and terror.
They have to be stopped now. To give in and excuse their hurt feelings will give them courage to riot at everything and anything they perceive as a mark against their belief system... (can it really be called a religion?).
More like a mad cult.
They have to be stopped now. To give in and excuse their hurt feelings will give them courage to riot at everything and anything they perceive as a mark against their belief system... (can it really be called a religion?).
More like a mad cult.
Durgan said:
Yep no kidding. I never knew that the venerated prophet took a 6 year old wife when he was in his fifties (consumated when she was 9) until following cartoons from these discussions. Apparently marrying girls of 9 years old is not uncommon in Iran, Aparently an edict was issued that 9 is when girls become aware and are available for marriage.
The more light shined on Islam the less I like what I see.
It will certainly be very interesting to hear what various government pronouncements come,in regard to the cartoons and the inflamatory aftermath.
Poor little Denmark...a peaceful country...one wonders what their citizenry is thinking?
Poor little Denmark...a peaceful country...one wonders what their citizenry is thinking?
Are they just noticing this type of thing now? I mean really, haven't they seen the umpteen cartoons depicting them in a humours, yet evil light for some time now? Not to mention the way Hollywood protrays mid-easterners, they're always the terrorist. Talk about type casting.
Anyway, I think they're lacking in fatawas these days. These cartoons were printed 4 months ago....4 MONTHS AGO. Hello, get a faster internet connection.
Anyway, I think they're lacking in fatawas these days. These cartoons were printed 4 months ago....4 MONTHS AGO. Hello, get a faster internet connection.