US faults Mohammed cartoons

BERLIN -- The US State Department yesterday criticized cartoons in European newspapers depicting the Prophet Mohammed as offensive to Muslims, but also defended the right of free speech and urged all sides to show tolerance for others' values. Tens of thousands of angry Muslims staged fresh protests from Britain to Malaysia, burning European flags and threatening wider violence.

The remarks by State Department officials in Washington seemed aimed at calming a controversy fast ballooning into an international crisis. Muslim marchers took to the streets on three continents and Islamic politicians and religious leaders issued fiery blasts at the West.

''While we share the offense that Muslims have taken at these images, we at the same time vigorously defend the right of individuals to express points of view," said department spokesman Sean McCormack. ''Media organizations are going to have to make their own decisions concerning what is printed. . . . We would urge all parties to exercise the maximum degree of understanding, the maximum degree of tolerance when they talk about this issue."

The drawings first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and were reprinted this week by papers in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, and other European countries. The cartoons were almost invariably accompanied by commentary defending freedom of expression even when it borders on sacrilege. Muslims regard any physical depiction of Mohammed as blasphemous.

In Copenhagen, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with diplomats from Islamic nations, but later told reporters that his government will not accede to Muslim demands for a formal apology for the caricatures.

''It is important to understand how our society works," he said. ''We have a free press and the government has no authority to control or interfere with the press."

But European leaders seemed anxious to assuage wounded Muslim feelings.

''I am concerned about this escalation we've seen over the last few days," Austria's foreign minister, Ursula Plassnik, said at a news conference in Vienna. ''It is high time to step back and make an effort to see things with each other's eyes and heart."

The largest protests yesterday took place in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, but hundreds of demonstrators also rallied outside Denmark's embassy in London, where women wearing the traditional headscarves favored by many Muslim females hoisted banners proclaiming, ''Kill the one who insults the prophet," according to wire service reports and television news broadcasts.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey decried the caricatures as an attack on ''our spiritual values," while Pakistan's parliament unanimously passed a resolution condemning the sketches as part of a ''vicious, outrageous, provocative campaign" against Muslims.

At issue are a dozen Danish-drawn political cartoons of Mohammed, some innocuous, some plainly satirical -- including one in which the prophet wears a bomb with a sputtering fuse instead of a turban. All were commissioned by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in response to complaints by the author of a children's book on Mohammed who could not find an illustrator willing to risk Muslim wrath.

Islam forbids any likenesses of Mohammed, who founded the faith in 7th-century Arabia. The ban stems from fear that spiritual faith will become idolatry, the worship of ''divine images" instead of God.

In the current controversy, many European intellectuals and politicians have argued that secular societies are under no particular obligation to respect religious rules, and that even sacrilege must be tolerated in the name of free speech.

That Western view was passionately defended yesterday by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch parliamentarian of Muslim heritage. ''This is Europe," she told the BBC in a radio interview. ''If we have a thought, we express it."

In Paris, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters: ''Given the choice, I prefer too many caricatures to too much censorship."

But in Qatar, political columnist Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud seemed to speak for many followers of Islam when he told Reuters: ''Muslims are fed up with insults against Islam and the Muslim world has reached [the] breaking point."

Enraged protesters took to the streets in Palestinian cities by the tens of thousands, issuing calls for ''vengeance" against those European nations where newspapers printed the offending cartoons. A hand grenade was hurled into the compound of the French Cultural Center in Gaza, but failed to explode. A German citizen was slightly roughed up after briefly being taken hostage. A cleric at the Omari mosque in Gaza City told worshipers that those responsible for publishing the cartoons should have their heads lopped off, according to Reuters. Marchers called upon Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to avenge the faith.

In Iraq, thousands of worshipers rallied in protest after yesterday's mosque services, while the leader of Shi'ite Muslims denounced the sketches as insulting to followers of the faith.

In Indonesia, foreign ministry spokesman Yuri Thamrin said the dispute goes beyond the offending cartoons. ''It involves the whole Islamic world vis-a-vis . . . the trend of Islamphobia," he told reporters in Jakarta.

Yesterday, in Washington, McCormack sought to chart a middle course.

''You are dealing with deeply held beliefs, and certainly we have talked about the importance of urging tolerance and appreciating differences and to respect the fact that millions and millions of people around the world would find these particular images offensive," he said.

Farah Stockman of the Globe staff contributed to this report from New York.