Press Twists Facts Over Cartoon Crisis: Activist

“They want to turn people’s attention to another issue to divert attention from the publication of the dozen cartoons that mocked Prophet Muhammad,” Mohammad Al-Khalid Samha, a member of the European Committee for Prophet Honoring and leader of the Danish Muslim delegation who visited Egypt and Saudi Arabia, told IOL over the phone from Odense.

“On September30 , Jyallands Posten published the first set of cartoons, which were followed two or three weeks by another offensive set published by Weekend Avisen,” Samha, also a mosque imam in Odense, explained.

“After the publication appeared to be slipping out of control, we sent letters of protest to Jyallands Posten with our names and e-mails written below, then we received threats, swear words and a third set of pictures from racists including a photo of a man from a pig-squealing contest [in France] and the name ‘Muhammad’ written down.”

Samha asserted that when he showed the photos to reporters at a press conference in Cairo following his meetings with Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Sayed Tantawi, he made it very clear that this photo was sent to Danish Muslims by e-mail.

“I never said, as Danish newspapers now claim, that this photo was published by Jyallands Posten,” he fumed. “The TV cameras, which aired the news conference, took the photo but left the sound.”

Denmark has been the focus of Muslim rage since images -- one showing the Prophet with a turban resembling a bomb -- first appeared in the Posten and were subsequently published elsewhere in Europe.

Newspapers in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, the United States, Japan, Norway, Malaysia, Australia, Jordan, Yemen, Ukraine and Fiji have so far reprinted some of the dozen cartoons.

The satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo Wednesday printed all12 of the controversial cartoons as well as a new front-page caricature of its own.

Insufficient Apology

Samha blamed the Jyallands Posten chief editor for his insufficient apology.

“He should have apologized for hurting the feelings of Muslims and publishing the photos, not just for hurting Muslims. If he had done this, the crisis would have been nipped in the bud.”

Jyllands-Posten has recently said the cartoons “were not in violation of Danish law but have irrefutably offended many Muslims, and for that we apologize.”

The Danish editor who first published them regretted the caricatures saying he would not have done so if he had known the consequences.

“If I had known that the lives of Danish soldiers and civilians would be threatened, if I had known that as my finger hovered one centimeter above the send button for publishing the drawings, would I have hit it? No,” Jyllands-Posten editor-in-chief Carsten Juste told the Politiken daily earlier in the month.

Stop Violence

The Muslim leader strongly denounced the violent protests in some Muslim countries over the cartoons crisis, urging Muslims to vent their anger in a civilized way.

“We can never condone the burning of embassies and public properties as a way to protest the cartoons,” Samha said.

“This is a repugnant crime and a grisly act that badly affected our cause as we are accused now of inciting such attacks.”

He said dialogue is the one and only way to defuse the crisis, not violence.

“We embarked on our tour and explained to Muslim scholars and leaders in Egypt our position and tackled the issue in a civilized and a calm way,” he said.

“If we really had added fuel to the fire as claimed by some Danish newspapers, we would have heard about shootings, killings or violent protests in Egypt."

The violent protests took place in the countries which the Danish Muslim delegation did not visit.

Muslims protesting against the cartoons set fire to the Danish consulate in Beirut Sunday after Syrian protesters had done the same with the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus a day earlier.

Muslim scholars, organizations and leaders were united Sunday in condemning the violent attacks against the embassies.

“Some people, who have nothing to do with Islam, have jumped on the bandwagon to achieve personal gains,” he said.

Pundits say that some regimes in the Muslim world have tried to make capital of the crisis by stepping up their campaigns against the cartoons and making several press statements over the issue to outweigh the rising Islamist groups.

On the way out of the current crisis, Samha said Muslim leaders are pressing now for an international resolution criminalizing blasphemy “and will continue with our peaceful dialogue with our government.”

http://islamonline.net/English/News/2006-02/08/article04.shtml