Free Republic

Cartoon upsets Muslims Anton Ferreira Zapiro’s dig at a Sunday newspaper’s zero tolerance for Satanism upsets some readers. Cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro — better known as Zapiro — has riled Muslims with a cartoon that portrays Allah, but he is unrepentant. “I do these things because I believe in freedom of expression,” Shapiro said, acknowledging that his cartoon in the Cape Times yesterday had landed him in hot water. He said he understood the cartoon had provoked a flood of angry SMS messages from the Muslim community. It was drawn in support of columnist Deon Maas, who was fired by Rapport...

About 70 people gathered Friday March 10th in front of the Danish Embassy at Number One California Street in San Francisco, California for a Rally to Support Denmark and Free SpeechThis was organized by Cinnamon Stillwell, a writer in Northern California.

Writers issue cartoon row warning The cartoons provoked outrage across the Muslim world Salman Rushdie is among a dozen writers to have put their names to a statement in a French weekly paper warning against Islamic "totalitarianism".The writers say the violence sparked by the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad shows the need to fight for secular values and freedom. The statement is published in Charlie Hebdo, one of several European papers to reprint the caricatures. The images, first published in Denmark, have angered Muslims across the world. One showed the Prophet Muhammad, whose depiction is banned in...

Tuesday, February 28, 2006 A Manifesto Slams Islamic Totalitarianism Heads are gonna roll...........no pun intended. From Agora; Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali et al Slam Islamic Totalitarianism This just in, stay tuned as the story develops. I think we’ll be seeing people die in the coming days. You know, from "reactions"…. MANIFESTO:Together facing the new totalitarianismAfter having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism. We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred...

"In my religion" said Imam abu Laban, leading Muslim cleric of Denmark, "drawing images of Prophet Muhammad is forbidden." In my country, said the editor in chief of Copenhagen's Jyllands Posten newspaper, "there is a freedom of press." The BBC TV forum was attempting to educate its vast public worldwide about the cartoon drama. Unfortunately, the debate left viewers in greater disarray. The anchor seemed to ignore why theological cartoons are offensive to Muslims to start with, but also missed why secular democracies are clashing with their antithesis. World media and their respective governments have been reacting to television images...

Copenhagen, Denmark (AHN) - Denmark is pulling its ambassadors out of Syria, Iran and Indonesia to protect them. The Foreign Ministry says their safety was at risk after a Danish newspaper published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Denmark's embassies have been targeted by angry mobs. The Danish Foreign Ministry released a statement saying, “The ambassador and expatriate staff at the embassy in Jakarta have left Indonesia, it added. "This is due to information about reliable security threats against staff at the embassy." According to the ministry, the Finnish embassy will handle consular tasks for Denmark in Iran, and the Dutch...

Thousands protest against prophet cartoons (Filed: 11/02/2006) Several thousand Muslims turned out to demonstrate against the controversial cartoons of the prophet Mohammed - but the numbers were far lower than the 30,000 the organisers hoped would take part. The demonstration passed off peacefully They gathered in London's Trafalgar Square holding banners proclaiming: "United Against Incitement And Islamophobia." There were fears that the rally, backed by Mayor Ken Livingstone and a coalition of moderate Muslim groups, would be disrupted by extremist factions. But the majority of people who turned out said they had come to prove that Islam was peaceful and...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia's top cleric called on the world's Muslims to reject apologies for the "slanderous" caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammed and demanded the authors and publishers of the cartoons be tried and punished, Saudi newspapers reported Saturday. Thousands of Muslims, meanwhile, took to the streets in London and several other European cities to protest the drawings that were first published in a Danish newspaper in September and recently reprinted in other European publications. One depicted the prophet with a turban shaped like a bomb with a burning fuse. Denmark also announced it has temporarily withdrawn its...

Tehran, Iran, Feb. 10 – A senior Iranian cleric called on Muslims on Friday to direct their fury over cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad at the United States, rather than Denmark. When crowds of worshippers in Tehran chanted “Death to Denmark” during his fiery sermon, Tehran Friday prayers leader Ahmad Khatami told them, “We shouldn’t say ‘Death to Denmark’. Denmark is nothing! We must say, ‘Death to America’. It’s the Americans who set up the likes of the Danes”. Khatami, who is not related to Iran’s former president, accused the European Union of “double standards” in its approach to the...

The Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad last September, but the backlash from that has sparked renewed anger in the Islamic world — the latest being the burning of the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Syria. The roots of it all actually go back to Sept. 11, 2001, which created a highly charged environment where apparently, no subject is sacred in the West, especially topics related to Muslims and Islam. The embassy burnings are reminiscent of another controversy that brewed in 1988 and still simmers today. Salman Rushdie — then an obscure novelist of Muslim-Indian origin, wrote The...

COPENHAGEN, Feb. 9 — Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Thursday that attempts by European companies in the Middle East to disassociate themselves from Denmark or Danish products were "disgraceful." At the same time, Mr. Rasmussen tried to shield the Bush administration and some of Denmark's partners in NATO from accusations that they had been tardy and overcautious in coming to Denmark's defense in the crisis, which he attributed more to attempts by Iran and Syria to cause diversions in the Middle East than to a few satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper.Looking tired after what...

​ ​​​​We need to learn a new word: dhimmitude. I've written about dhimmitude periodically, lo, these many years since September 11, but it takes time to sink in. Dhimmitude is the coinage of a brilliant historian, Bat Ye'or, whose pioneering studies of the dhimmi, populations of Jews and Christians vanquished by Islamic jihad, have led her to conclude that a common culture has existed through the centuries among the varied dhimmi populations. From Egypt and Palestine to Iraq and Syria, from Morocco and Algeria to Spain, Sicily and Greece, from Armenia and the Balkans to the Caucasus: Wherever Islam conquered,...

EU commissioner urges European press code on religionBy David Rennie in Brussels(Filed: 09/02/2006)Plans for a European press charter committing the media to "prudence" when reporting on Islam and other religions, were unveiled yesterday. <script>document.write('<a href="http://ads.telegraph.co.uk/event.ng/Type%3dclick%26FlightID%3d12277%26AdID%3d14448%26TargetID%3d2697%26Segments%3d183,217,381,406,419,475,491,532,539,736,737,928,950,964,998,1040,1057,1063,1088,1242,1278,1418,1419,1428,1532,1552,1578,1582,1649,1652,1673,1695,1700,1703,1704,1714,1728,1748,1754,1756,1773,1774,1780%26Targets%3d154,3121,3146,2697,3142,3171,2700,3266,2611,3113,2945,2950,3141,3169,3196,3238,3261,3274,2858,2865,2919,3028,2936%26Values%3d25,30,50,62,75,85,100,110,150,155,196,197,198,1275,1282,1393,1444,1462,1503,1899,2096,2098,2248,2262,2336,2423,2500,2542,2564,2619,2626,2629,2630,2631,2632,2650,2664,2666,2667,2682,2860,3116%26RawValues%3d%26Redirect%3dhttp:%252f%252fclk.atdmt.com/MDG/go/tlgrpbpu0050000011mdg/direct/01/bzzawjw,bbRzWRebghNzN/" target="_blank"><img src="http://view.atdmt.com/MDG/view/tlgrpbpu0050000011mdg/direct/01/bzzawjw,bbRzWRebghNzN/" width="200" height="200" border="0" alt=""></a><br>');</script> Franco Frattini, the European Union commissioner for justice, freedom and security, revealed the idea for a code of conduct in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. Mr Frattini, a former Italian foreign minister, said the EU faced the "very real problem" of trying to reconcile "two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion".Millions of...

A Danish paper's caricatures of Mohammed have given Mideast governments an excuse to fan the flames of fury and deflect attention from their own failingsTensions between the West and the Islamic world, including the large Muslim communities in Europe, have reached alarming proportions. The most talked about development has been the hostile and violent reaction across the Middle East and South Asia to some crude cartoons derogatory to the prophet Mohammed and Islam published in a leading Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, last September. The attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in the Arab world and other rioting, some of it...

> Protests have continued throughout the Muslim world over the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. (And thousands of other iterations.)

Embassies set ablaze, goods boycotted, citizens warned not to travel to certain volatile regions for fear of their safety, this time the target is Europe, where more than a dozen newspapers have reprinted controversial cartoons of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad. Middle East and North Africa specialist at the International Study and Research Center in Paris, Luis Martinez, says it is a troubling sign for Europe. He says, until now, Europe has been able to convince Arab societies in particular to forget certain historical facts, such as the Christian Crusades and European colonization of their countries. Europe now has a more...

This is the young Danish Islamic scholar who distributed booklets of photocopied cartoons to Muslim leaders in the Mideast, sparking a firestorm of anger around the world DOUG SAUNDERS COPENHAGEN -- In late December, a young Danish man flew to Beirut. In his suitcase was a package of spiral-bound booklets in green covers, neatly compiled using a colour photocopier. Their contents consisted mainly of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. He was unlikely to have stood out. A short man of 31 who could have passed for half that age, he had a feminine voice and soft hands and was somewhat...

The Danish Islamic scholar who brought cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to the attention of Muslim leaders around the world says he was only trying to boost his campaign to get an apology from the Danish newspaper that first published them. INDEPTH: Muhammad cartoons: A timeline Danish Islamic scholar Ahmed Akkari, right, and Carsten Juste, editor in chief of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which published cartoons depicting the Prophet, before a debate on Danish television, Sunday, Feb. 5. (AP Photo/POLFOTO, Carsten Snejbjerg) "I guess we took the illustrations to influential people so they could help," Ahmed Akkari told CBC News...

    Lost in the furor over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad is the fact that his likeness has long been portrayed in the collections of some of the world's greatest museums and libraries without exciting alarm or comment.     While rare in the 1,400 years of Islamic art, depictions of Muhammad are found in the collections of such institutions as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris and the Edinburgh University library.     Muhammad has been portrayed in the work of revered Muslim artists and of such Western figures as William Blake, Auguste Rodin and Salvador Dali...

Muslims who want to live under the Islamic Sharia law were told Wednesday to get out of Australia as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown. Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and...