Imams incited protests, Denmark says

COPENHAGEN -- Denmark's government, accusing some local imams of whipping up anti-Danish anger in the Middle East over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, said yesterday it would exclude them from talks on ethnic minority integration.

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told parliament that a tour of the Middle East by a group of Danish imams in December and January, when the row over the cartoons published last year resurfaced violently, had ratcheted up the Muslim protests.

''Some people in this country have poured fuel on the fire by spreading disinformation in the wake of that trip to the Middle East," he said.

Immigration Minister Rikke Hvilshoj said those who took part in or sponsored the tour would be excluded from talks launched last year to improve the integration of minorities.

The center-right government has remained in power partly because of a crackdown on immigration at the urging of its allies in the Danish Peoples Party, which has called for the expulsion of the leaders involved in the trips to Egypt and Lebanon last year.

The Danish Peoples Party's leader, Pia Kjaersgaard, wrote in a newsletter this week: ''The seeds of weeds have come to Denmark -- Islamists and liars -- who have fuelled the lethal fire through their tour of the Middle East. We will deal with them."

Ahmed Abu-Laban, who organized the trips last year, defied the DPP to try to expel him.

''This is a country of law and order, I trust the judicial system. I came in a legal way and I behave in a legal way," he said.

He earlier told Reuters Television he regretted the violence the trip may have caused.

''If the violence is against the issue of intellectual communication and engagement, then yes I regret it," he said.

Danish media have reported that the imams who traveled to the Middle East used pictures not published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which originally sparked the controversy, to gather support for their cause.

One photograph, showing a bearded man with strap-on pig's ears and snout, turned out not to be a mocked-up image of the Prophet Mohammed but an Associated Press picture of a Frenchman participating in an annual pig festival, the media said.

Jack Stokes, an AP spokesman, said the picture, taken in August, was used ''completely out of context and without permission."

''AP is attempting to contact the distributors of this unrelated photo to protest its misrepresentation and demand that they stop immediately," he said.