www.chinaview.cn 2006-02-06 20:48:25
LONDON, Feb.6 (Xinhuanet) -- The Metropolitan Police is to investigate protesters in London who urged violence against Westerners over the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad.
The force is considering its options following calls from members of Parliament to prosecute those who threatened suicide bombings and incited murder during the demonstrations over the weekend, the Guardian reported on Monday. Comment: For an analysis of how the Danish cartoon affair is being used to vilify Islam and set up Muslems, see our editorial Preparing the World For Another 9/11.
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By Peter Matthews
ICH 5 Feb 06 Most of us are now well aware of the caricatures of the prophet Mohammad, solicited by and published last September in the right-wing Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. This week several publications resurrected those controversial images of Mohammad as a bomb-turbaned terrorist and another where he refuses suicide bombers entry into Heaven as “We’ve run out of Virgins.” Then our news sources informed us that due solely to these images “outrage sweeps across the Muslim world.” Such coverage has elicited miles of text and a Babel of blather denouncing those who would dare threaten OUR freedom of speech because it offends THEIR “backward” beliefs.
Like children following the Pied-Piper, many of us now lock-step behind the tune “Freedom of Expression,” deaf to the fact that there was precious little of the “RAGE, FURORE, VIOLENCE, DEATH THREATS” shouting from the headlines of mainstream news sources during the first two days of those stories. Given the virtual real-world absence of actual expressions of outrage, the mainstream media’s handling of this story plays like propaganda aimed at deepening the divide between “Us and Them.” |
By Remi Kanazi
ICH 4 Feb 06 Picture this: A cartoon of Jesus, with his pants down, smiling, raping a little boy. The caption above it reads “Got Catholicism?” Or how about a picture of a Rabbi with blood dripping from his mouth after bludgeoning a small Palestinian boy with a knife shaped like the Star of David—the caption reads “The Devil’s Chosen Ones.”
I wonder if people around the world would just consider this free speech? |
AFP
6 Feb 06 Global protests over cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed have escalated, with two demonstrators killed in Afghanistan and Lebanon and warning shots fired outside a US consulate in Indonesia.
After a weekend that saw Denmark's embassies torched in Lebanon and Syria, fury over the images continued to spread on Monday with protests held across Afghanistan as well as in Indian-held Kashmir, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran and Thailand. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy called for calm as the Arab world seethes over the cartoons which first appeared in a Danish daily and have been reprinted by several publications in Europe, Australia and Malaysia. |
AFP
6 Feb 06 ANKARA - A Roman Catholic priest was shot dead Sunday in the courtyard of a church in Turkey, raising fears the murder could be linked to the Muslim uproar over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in Europe.
Italian priest Andrea Santoro, 59, was shot twice in the entrance of the Santa Maria Catholic Church in the northern city of Trabzon and the Vatican's ambassador to Turkey said the gunman shouted "God is great" as he fired his pistol. |
Staff and agencies
Monday February 6, 2006 The behaviour of some Muslim demonstrators in London over the last few days was "completely unacceptable", Downing Street said in a statement today.
No 10 said the police would have the government's full support in any actions they wished to take as a result of the demonstrations outside the Danish embassy over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, and the shadow attorney general, Dominic Grieve, called at the weekend for police to make arrests. But Tony Blair's spokesman stressed it was for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether arrests or prosecutions were justified. Comment: Let's not forget that if the cartoons had been about the Jews and the Holocaust, the government would be arresting the cartoonists and publishers and they would be roundly condemned globally.
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Tariq Ramadan
Guardian February 6, 2006 In Copenhagen last October, as demonstrations provoked by the Danish satirical cartoons about Islam were starting, a reporter from the newspaper that published them told me how intensely the editorial staff had debated whether to go ahead, how uncomfortable many of them had been about the whole issue and, at the same time, how surprised they had been by the strong reaction from Muslims and the Arab embassies. At the time, however, the tension seemed likely to remain within Danish borders.
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