February 3 2006.
Muslim outrage gathers pace
By Bertrand Benoit in Berlin and FT Reporters
Published: February 3 2006 18:44 | Last updated: February 3 2006 18:44
Angry protests over newspaper cartoons of the prophet Mohammad continued to
spread globally on Friday as Muslim leaders and politicians in Europe expressed
mounting concern that the outrage could destabilise the multicultural continent.
In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, protesters stormed the lobby of the Jakarta high-rise building housing the Danish embassy. Other incidents and protests were reported from Pakistan to the Darfur region of Sudan and the Palestinian territories, where European Union observers evacuated Danish and French nationals after gunmen had briefly held a German man in the West Bank on Thursday night.
In London, hundreds of Muslims marched from the Regent's Park mosque, one of the biggest Islamic centres in Europe, to the heavily protected Danish embassy, bearing placards declaring “Behead the one who insults the prophet” and “Free speech go to hell”.
The most serious religious clash since the 1989 Salman Rushdie
affair erupted last September when Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten published 12 caricatures of Mohammad, the seventh-century founder of Islam, in protest at what it called “the rejection of modern, secular society” by some Muslims.
The debate only boiled over last month when European newspapers began reprinting the cartoons, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, sparking a fresh wave of protests in the Muslim world, including boycotts of Danish products and the recalling of ambassadors to Copenhagen.
Islamik Trossamfund, a small Danish Muslim organisation, has been accused of throwing petrol on the fire after its leaders toured the Middle-East circulating highly offensive pictures of Muslims that had never appeared in the Danish press.
Jyllands-Posten wrote in a leader article on Friday that regretted underestimating the strength of Muslim reaction over the drawings but declined to apologise for publishing them.
In Europe, the wave of indignation has triggered a debate about the freedom of the press, responsibility and self-censorship at a time of rising tension between Christian majorities and large, and growing, Muslim minorities.
Community leaders, journalists and politicians in Germany yesterday called on editors to show responsibility in the exercise of free speech while condemning the more extreme reactions to the controversial cartoons.
Die Welt, a conservative daily, reprinted a portrait of Mohammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban on its front page this week in what Roger Köppel, editor, told the FT reflected a “journalist’s duty to report.”
Wolfgang Schäuble, interior minister, rejected calls for the government to apologise on behalf of the press, saying “here in Europe, governments have nothing to say about which paper publishes what.”
The debate has assumed a particular resonance in Germany, where racist cartoons were often used by the National-Socialist press to incite hatred of the Jews and cement prejudice in the population ahead of Hitle’s rise to power in 1933.
Kenan Kolat, chairman of the Turkish community, which makes up the bulk of Germany’s 3.2m Muslims, told the FT: “Any attempt at muzzling the press should be condemned. But editors must also be sensitive in their approach to minorities. There is still a lot of ignorance around about Islam.”
Mr Kolat urged all sides not to “play in the hands of extremists”. The debate, he said, was “a godsend for Islamists and anti-Muslims everywhere. All should be done to stop the escalation now.”
Cebel Kücükkaraca, an academic and head of the Turkish Community in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, said “We must try harder not to give extremists an open flank.”
Highlighting the risk of escalation, the German extreme-right Republican party said in a statement yesterday that the outrage marked “the beginning of open war between cultures in Europe," adding: “the door is now open for blackmail by the Mohammedans.”
In Paris, president Jacques Chirac met with Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Muslim Council and rector of the Paris mosque, to discuss the growing outrage. The French government has given mixed messages over the crisis, defending free speech while condemning any provocative content.
Massoud Shadjareh, the head of the British Islamic Human Rights Commission, distanced his organisation from yesterday’s London march, which he said had been organised by “extremists”. A larger demonstration by mainstream Muslim groups is scheduled for today.
The US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said yesterday: "Intentionally provocative attacks on Islam should be rejected in the same way that credible media outlets quite rightly decline to publish anti-Semitic materials.”
Journalists have come under fire too in parts of the Muslim world. In Jordan, the editor of the Shihan weekly was sacked for reprinting cartoons, while Rakyat Merdeka, an Indonesian tabloid, was forced to remove one of the Danish caricatures from its website yesterday.
“We deplore all the media, including the Indonesian media, that expose (that cartoon),” said Din Syamsuddin, head of Muhammadyah, one of Indonesia’s biggest mainstream Islamic groups.
Abdul Rahman al Noaimy, a lawyer and professor from Qatar university, told the FT on a visit to Cairo that he planned to sue each newspaper that had published the cartoons in their respective European countries.
Additional reporting by Shawn Donnan in Jakarta, Chris Conlon in Budapest, Martin Arnold in Paris, Jimmy Burns in London, William Wallis in Cairo, Pavi Munter in Stockholm and Edward alden in WashingtonEnds
It's The End Of Our World As You Know It.
Iran Show Down Over Nuclear Power
Iran's UN Referral Delayed on Mideast Weapons Demand (Update2)Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The United Nations nuclear watchdog delayed voting on a resolution to send Iran to the UN Security Council over its atomic program because some countries want the measure to declare the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors will reconvene in Vienna at 10 a.m. local time tomorrow, the IAEA said. The draft resolution, written by European diplomats and backed by the U.S., says the IAEA ``doesn't have confidence that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes.'' A referral to the Security Council may result in economic sanctions. IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei said the measure has enough votes to pass. The demand for wording in the resolution that the Middle East be free of nuclear arms came from some developing countries, said diplomats and IAEA officials who requested anonymity because negotiations are ongoing. Members of the 16-nation Non-Aligned Movement are withholding support for the resolution until a reference to the zone is included. ``This is code for dealing with Israel's nuclear weapons arsenal,'' said former UN weapons inspector David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, in a telephone interview. Israeli Program While Israel has never acknowledged having nuclear weapons, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington- based policy study group, estimated in July that the Jewish state possesses enough nuclear material for between 100 and 170 atomic weapons. The Non-Aligned Movement ``reiterates its support for the establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of all nuclear weapons,'' Malaysia's ambassador to the IAEA, Rajmah Hussain, said in a statement yesterday. ``The push to have a Middle East, nuclear weapons-free zone is about Israel but it's also about Arab states trying to find some fig leaf so they can support the resolution,'' Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear weapons analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a telephone interview. ``It will shield them from criticism back home and from Iran if they can say there's some balance in the resolution.'' `Longstanding' Goal Joseph Cirincione, a nuclear proliferation expert at Carnegie, said he doubts such language will jeopardize the resolution on Iran or cause other countries to balk. ``The goal of a nuclear-free Middle East is a longstanding one in UN resolutions and in U.S. policy,'' Cirincione said. ``Even Israel has agreed in principle to this.'' In 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he was ready to discuss making the Middle East nuclear-free as part of future peace talks in the region, according to an Associated Press report from the time that cited ElBaradei. A referral will put an end to a Russian offer to enrich Iranian uranium on Russian soil, Iranian diplomat Javad Vaidi said at a news conference today. Adopting the resolution would ``kill the Russian proposal,'' Vaidi told reporters in Vienna. ElBaradei yesterday called the Russian idea ``very attractive,'' and the U.S. has endorsed it. Oil Rises Oil prices rose after Iran said it would be less cooperative with the IAEA if it were referred to the Security Council. Crude oil for March delivery rose 67 cents, or 1 percent, to $65.35 a barrel at the 2:30 p.m. close of floor trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices yesterday touched $64.40, their lowest since Jan. 13, after the U.S. said it wouldn't seek immediate sanctions against Iran. ``We still do have this situation with Iran,'' said Simon Wardell, an analyst at Global Insights Inc. today in London. ``Over the next month, what kind of signals we get from the Iranian government, what kind of diplomacy we hear, those things could dictate whether oil prices do fall a little bit as the fundamentals would suggest, or whether they remain high.'' Iran ``would have no other choice but to suspend all the voluntary measures and extra cooperation with the agency'' should it be sent to the Security Council, the country's National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, wrote yesterday in a letter to the IAEA. The IAEA's ``monitoring would extensively be limited and all the peaceful nuclear activities being under voluntary suspension would be resumed without any restriction,'' Laranjani said in the letter. Iran's withdrawal of cooperation would mean that the Vienna- based IAEA would no longer be able to conduct spot inspections of Iranian nuclear sites or have ready access to people and documents. Iran isn't threatening to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, meaning that scheduled IAEA inspections would continue at declared nuclear sites. The draft resolution before the IAEA calls on Iran to open military sites to UN inspectors and account for documents, related to the procurement of machinery and equipment for its nuclear program, that the Iranians haven't produced. Iran was found in ``non-compliance'' with its treaty obligations by the IAEA board of governors in September. |
To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net or Judy Mathewson in Washington at (1) .Last Updated: February 3, 2006 15:50 EST |
Cartoon
controversy spreads throughout Muslim world
Guardian Unlimited -
Governments across Europe, the Middle East and Asia were
reluctantly sucked into the Danish cartoon row yesterday as hundreds of
thousands of Muslims took to the streets to protests. The dispute spread to
London for the first time. ...
Straw
attacks 'insulting' Islam cartoons
The
twelve caricatures of Mohammed
Egyptian
Ferry Carrying 1,400 Sinks in Red Sea
New York Times -
About 100 survivors were rescued today after an Egyptian ferry
carrying about 1,400 people sank overnight on its way across the Red Sea from
Saudi Arabia, Egyptian officials said. At least 45 dead bodies were also
recovered, news agencies reported. ...
Overcrowding
the likely reason as a collision is ruled out
Egyptian
Ferry Carrying More Than 1,400 Sinks in Red Sea