Islamic anger widens at Mohammed cartoons

BERLIN -- An extraordinary row over newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed intensified yesterday, with street demonstrations from North Africa to Pakistan, threats of violence against Europeans in the Middle East, and diplomatic protests by Muslim nations.

The caricatures, originally published in September by a Danish paper, include one depicting Mohammed as a terrorist with a bomb in a turban. As the furor has escalated, newspapers in Europe have reprinted the images, which have appeared on websites worldwide.

The cartoons have stirred outrage across the Islamic world, which considers any caricatures of the prophet to be blasphemous.

The threats triggered a backlash in Europe this week, with editorialists and politicians proclaiming that free-press protections apply to political satire that is neither obscene nor racist.

Yesterday, Palestinian gunmen surrounded the European Union office in the Gaza Strip, and fired shots into the air. The protesters demanded that countries where the images have appeared apologize for the cartoons. The Associated Press reported that many European journalists, aid workers, and diplomats were pulling out of Gaza last night because of death and kidnapping threats.

Also yesterday, Norway and Denmark closed their diplomatic missions in the Palestinian West Bank for fear of attack, while in Paris, a top editor of the newspaper France Soir was dismissed for reprinting the cartoons, according to French press reports.

The controversy started with the appearance of a dozen satiric images of Islam's founder in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten last September. It escalated after at least a dozen newspapers in Switzerland, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, and other countries reprinted the Danish cartoons on Wednesday, usually with accompanying editorials asserting that freedom of speech is a more important value in democracies than respect for religious sensitivities.

Scores of Muslim political and religious leaders in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have vehemently protested. The outgoing Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said yesterday that the images ''provoke all Muslims everywhere in the world. We hope that the concerned [European] governments are attentive to the sensitivity of this issue."

In an official statement, Kuwait labeled the drawings ''despicable racism," while gunmen in the West Bank reportedly combed hotels, possibly in search of Westerners to abduct.

Palestinian militants warned that if European governments did not apologize, Westerners in the region ''will be targeted," according to wire service reports.

In Pakistan, protesters chanted, ''Death to Denmark! Death to France!"

The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has rejected demands from Arab governments to rebuke the newspaper Jyllands-Posten for publishing the caricatures, will hold an emergency meeting today in Copenhagen with diplomats from Muslim countries. He said the dispute has gone from a tiff over one newspaper's editorial decision to an international clash of values.

''We are talking about an issue with fundamental significance to how democracies work" Rasmussen told reporters yesterday. ''I can't call a newspaper and tell them what to put in."

Most sects of Islam forbid artistic depictions of the human form. Physical representations of Mohammed, no matter how benign, are deemed blasphemous because they might give rise to idolatry.

Jyllands-Posten commissioned the cartoons by 12 Danish artists in response to a complaint by the author of a children's book on Mohammed that he could not find an artist willing to risk Muslim ire by illustrating the work.

Most of the cartoons seem innocuous to the Western eye. One simply depicts Mohammed as a sage old man.

But another shows Mohammed at the gates of heaven, warning suicide bombers: ''Stop! we have run out of virgins" -- an allusion to the 72 virgins that, Islamic tradition holds, are accorded the status of Muslim martyrs when they reach paradise.

In most Western countries, political cartoonists make editorial comments by mocking ideologies, social conventions, and politicians and prominent figures.

''The reaction of Arab regimes betrays . . . a lack of understanding of the nature of press freedom," said Robert Ménard, head of the Paris-based media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, The countries that have most vehemently protested the cartoons -- including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria -- have no tradition of free speech, he noted.

The German newspaper Die Welt, which published one of the Danish cartoons on its front page Wednesday, made much the same point in an editorial: ''There is no right to protection from satire in the West."

But Muslim editorialists disagreed.

''It is no longer a matter of thought or opinion or belief," a journalist, Samir Ragab wrote in Egypt's state daily, el-Gomhuria. ''It's a plot hatched against Islam and Muslims."

The Jordanian weekly newspaper Shihan yesterday also reprinted some of the Danish caricatures of Mohammed, in order to ''display to the public the extent of the Danish offense and condemn it in the strongest terms," said the editor-in-chief, Jihad al-Momani.

But only hours later, Momani was fired by the publisher and the editions were withdrawn, and the government threatened legal action against the publisher, according to wire service reports.

When they first appeared last fall, the cartoons were initially met by local protests by Muslims in Denmark, but drew almost no notice anywhere else. That changed, however, when a group of Islamic activists from the Scandinavian nation toured mosques and religious centers in the Persian Gulf last month, calling upon Muslims to protest.

Their campaign triggered an economic boycott that has caused tens of millions of dollars in losses to Danish companies, a major supplier of dairy items and pharmaceuticals to the region.

In Paris, the managing editor of France Soir, Jacques Lefranc, reportedly was dismissed by the paper's owner, Egyptian business magnate Raymond Lakah, who apologized to Muslims for any offense caused by the cartoons. Even so, the newspaper yesterday ran a ringing editorial defense of publishing the caricatures.

''Imagine a society that added up all the prohibitions of different religions," the newspaper stated. ''What would remain of freedom to think, to speak, and even to come and go?"