"The pen is mightier than the sword"

Man to the left: "Can I have that in writing and signed" ?


http://www.volkskrant.nl
http://www.volkskrant.nl/multimedia/archive/00031/collignon700496_31148a.jpg

Telegraph defends freedom of speech

in an otherwise extremely silent Britain. Remembering the Tube last year and the islamists they have not yet deported, it´s not so very strange.
Why we will defend the right to offend
The right to offend within the law remains crucial to our free speech. Muslims who choose to live in the West must accept that we, too, have a right to our values, and to live according to them. Muslims must accept the predominant mores of their adopted culture: and most do. One of these is the lack of censorship and the ready availability of material that some people find deeply offensive: anyone who wishes to see the cartoons can find them within a few clicks on the internet.
Those Muslims who cannot tolerate the openness and robustness of intellectual debate in the West have perhaps chosen to live in the wrong culture. We cannot put it better than the editorial in an Arab paper in which the cartoons briefly appeared yesterday (before all copies were suddenly withdrawn): “Muslims of the world, be reasonable.”
http://telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/02/03/dl0301.xml

"Oh Brother, where art thou"

Alienated Danish Muslims Sought Help from Arabs
By SPIEGEL Staff
Twelve drawings of Muhammad printed in a major Danish newspaper have turned millions of Muslims against Denmark. And one man's mission has transformed the caricatures into the stuff of international diplomacy. The Arab world, though, isn't being given the full story.
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[foto: two of the faked "evidence": text: 1."Pig. Here´s the real picture of Muhammed." 2: "Why muslims pray"]

One group of Danish Muslims, led by a young imam named Ahmed Akkari, grew so frustrated by the inability of Muslims to get their message across in Denmark that they compiled a dossier of racist and culturally insensitive images circulating in the country and took them on an road show in the Arab World to raise awareness of the discrimination they faced."There is currently a climate (in Denmark) that is contributing to an increase in racism," the group warned in the introduction to a 43-page dossier it prepared before traveling to Egypt in late 2005. It dedicated the rest of the dossier to "drawings and pictures" that disparaged Islam and "denigrated the prophet." The offending images included Muhammad with a bomb wrapped in his turban. The Muslim community in the small Scandinavian country erupted in anger -- not only did the images denigrate Islam's central figure, many felt the drawings also equated all Muslims with terrorism.
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Kaare Quist, a journalist at the Danish daily Ekstra Bladet, who has been reporting on the story for a number of weeks, says the group found a number of highly placed officials in the Arab World keen to listen to its message.
Quist told SPIEGEL ONLINE they included representatives of the Arab League, Egypt's grand mufti and other high-level officials. The trip the group made, Quist believes, helped to raise attention to the political cartoons in Jyllands-Posten and prejudices against Denmark's Muslims.
Some 270,000 of Denmark's 5.4 million population are Muslim, making up 5 percent of the population.Quist says the dossier they shared in Egypt may have been far more damaging than the Jyllands-Posten episode -- and it may have further exacerbated misgivings between Denmark and the Arab world.
In addition to the now notorious caricatures published by the newspaper which have now spread like wildfire in the blogosphere, it also included patently offensive anti-Muslim images that had been sent to the group by other Muslims living in Denmark.
The origins or authenticity of the images haven't been confirmed, but their content was nevertheless damaging. Quist says the dossier included three obscene caricatures -- one showed Muhammad as a pedophile, another as a pig and the last depicted a praying Muslim being raped by a dog."The drawings in Jyllands-Posten were harmless compared to these," he says.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398624,00.html

DF - Danish Peoples Party gains territory
"The Muhammed crisis makes voters seek to anti immigrations party, Dansk folkeparti. In a poll today, the party would get 14.5 % of the votes.
http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Politik/2006/02/03/041502.htm

With the consent of the Liberals and Conservatives, the Danish Peoples´Party´s suggestion to see if non-citizen imams who have brought the Mohammed Affair to a boil cant be kicked out of the country looks set to go ahead. Today (friday) also some socialdemocrats joined.