Posted on 02/02/2006 1:59:11 PM PST by crushelits
A dozen Palestinian gunmen surrounded European Union offices in the Gaza Strip demanding an apology for the cartoons, one of which shows Islam's founder wearing a bomb-shaped turban. Muslims consider any images of Mohammad to be blasphemous.
Palestinian gunmen kidnapped and later released a German from a hotel in the West Bank city of Nablus, witnesses said.
Earlier, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened at a news conference to kidnap citizens of France, Denmark and Norway if they did not leave Nablus within 72 hours. Newspapers in Germany and Spain have also reprinted the caricatures.
Afghanistan condemned the publication of the caricatures and about 400 Islamic school students set fire to French and Danish flags in protest in the city of Multan in central Pakistan.
The owner of France Soir, a Paris daily that reprinted the cartoons on Wednesday along with a German paper, sacked its managing editor to show "a strong sign of respect for the beliefs and intimate convictions of every individual."
But the tabloid defended its right to print the cartoons, first published last September in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten.
Le Temps in Geneva and Budapest's Magyar Hirlap ran another offending cartoon showing an imam telling suicide bombers to stop because Heaven had run out of virgins to reward them.
Several European publications, such as Spain's ABC newspaper and Periodico de Catalunya, showed photographs of papers which had published the cartoons. Other European dailies including France's Le Monde printed cartoons mocking the row.
Some politicians criticized the press for fuelling the row.
FREE SPEECH VERSUS TABOOS IN ISLAM?
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the issue had gone beyond a row between Copenhagen and the Muslim world and now centered on Western free speech versus taboos in Islam, which is now the second religion in many European countries.
"We are talking about an issue with fundamental significance to how democracies work," Rasmussen told the Copenhagen daily Politiken. "One can safely say it is now an even bigger issue."
Rasmussen's office said he and Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller had summoned foreign envoys in Copenhagen for a Friday meeting to discuss the outcry and the government's response.
Denmark's ambassador in Paris met leaders of French Muslims, who have threatened legal action. The ambassador handed over a letter of regret from Rasmussen, written in Arabic, and an apology from the director of Jyllands-Posten.
France's tough-talking Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy defended the newspapers' decision to print the cartoons, adding he was surprised France Soir had sacked its editor.
"We must defend freedom of expression and if I had to chose, I prefer the excess of caricature over the excess of censure," Sarkozy said, adding there was no reason to make an exception for one religion over another.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the press must "deal with what it has got into" and others urged restraint.
"The actions by other European newspapers now, in publishing these cartoons, is throwing petrol onto the flames of the original issue, the original offence that was taken," said European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson.
Danish companies have reported sales falling in the Middle East after protests against the cartoons in the Arab world and calls for boycotts. Morocco and Tunisia confiscated Wednesday's France Soir, which is widely distributed in North Africa.
The Islamic Society of Finland said Muslims there had joined the boycott of Danish goods to protest against the cartoons.
CRITICISM MOUNTS
Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said Riyadh considered the cartoons an insult to Mohammad and all Muslims. "We hope that religious centers like the Vatican will clarify their opinion in this respect," he told the state news agency SPA.
Afghanistan said publication of the caricatures would give ammunition to those seeking to disrupt international relations.
"Any insult to the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) is an insult to more than 1 billion Muslims and an act like this must never be allowed to be repeated," Afghan President Hamid Karzai said in a statement.
In Beirut, the leader of Lebanon's Shi'ite Hizbollah said the row would never had occurred if a 17-year-old death edict against British writer Salman Rushdie been carried out.
The late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on Muslims in 1989 to kill Rushdie for blasphemy against Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses." Rushdie went into hiding and was never attacked.
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Mohammad, and Syria have recalled their ambassadors to Denmark.
No at all.
The French are selective (progressive) like most of the main stream press in the US
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