Danish Newspapers Reprint Prophet Muhammad Cartoons

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Danish newspapers reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a gesture of solidarity yesterday after police disclosed a plot to kill the creator of the caricature that sparked deadly riots in the Muslim world.Danish Muslims said they would seek to avoid a repeat of the violence two years ago — but with a right-wing Dutch lawmaker planning to air a movie that condemns Islam as fascist, Europe pondered the possibility of a new cycle of turmoil.“I just don’t want go through this again,” Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim educational group in London, said. Mr. Shafiq said he has written a protest letter to the Danish ambassador in London.Other Muslim groups echoed his sentiments, saying they believed the Danish papers were seeking unnecessarily to rekindle the fiery debate over free speech and Islam that engulfed Europe during the uproar over the cartoons in 2006. Some experts said that discussion never went away — it just drifted off the editorial pages of Europe’s dailies.“This conflict will remain as long as there are people who believe religion should have a greater role in society,” a Middle East expert at the Swedish Defense Research Agency, Magnus Norell, said.More than a dozen papers in Denmark reprinted what was arguably the most controversial of the 12 cartoons that enraged Muslims in early 2006 when they appeared in Western newspapers. The drawing, by newspaper cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, depicts Islam’s prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday’s arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill Mr. Westergaard.“We are doing this to document what is at stake in this case, and to unambiguously back and support the freedom of speech that we as a newspaper will always defend,” the Copenhagen-based Berlingske Tidende said.Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.At least three European newspapers — in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain — also reprinted the cartoon as part of their coverage of the Danish arrests.The debate already had resurfaced recently in the Netherlands with lawmaker Geert Wilders’s plans to make an anti-Koran film portraying the religion as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.In Denmark, all eyes turned toward the Islamic Faith Community, a network of Muslim groups that many Danes say provoked the riots of 2006 by embarking on a Middle East tour seeking support for their fight against the paper that first published the cartoons, Jyllands-Posten.Group spokesman Kasem Ahmad said even though printing the cartoons “was like a knife in our hearts,” the group would not take action this time.“We have no plans to travel abroad or export this problem,” he told reporters at a mosque in Copenhagen. “Now we have decided to neglect and ignore any possible provocation.”In January and February of 2006, angry mobs burned the Danish flag and attacked Danish and other Western embassies in Muslim countries including Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. Danish products were boycotted by many Muslim consumers. Protesters were killed in Libya and Afghanistan.The Danish Foreign Ministry said its diplomatic missions worldwide were watching for any signs of unrest related to the cartoon. It had not observed any strong reactions yesterday, Uffe Wolffhechel of the ministry’s consular department said.In Egypt, one observer said there was no guarantee that violence would not break out — and suggested Europe might be a possible stage.“I’m against any violent reaction, but how can you control or expect to control the 15-20 million Muslims living in Europe? How can you prevent a Muslim youth there not to try to take revenge while his religion and Prophet are being insulted?” an Egyptian writer, Fahmi Howeidy, said.

Danish Newspapers Reprint Prophet Muhammad Cartoons

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