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Sudan protests at Danish cartoons
Thousands of people have demonstrated in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, in protest at the reprinting of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
The cartoons were reprinted in Danish newspapers two years after they first prompted worldwide protests.
President Omar al-Bashir called for a Muslim boycott of Danish goods and said Danes were no longer welcome in Sudan.
A German minister called on European newspapers to reprint the cartoons as a show of support for press freedom.
Worldwide protests
Protests have taken place in Indonesia, the Gaza Strip, Pakistan, and Denmark since the cartoons were reprinted.
Correspondents say many protesters feel that Denmark has learnt little since the publication of the cartoons two years ago, which prompted protests and rioting across the world.
At least 50 people were killed and three Danish embassies were attacked in 2006.
In Sudan, the government-organised rally was mostly peaceful, though the atmosphere was highly charged, and there were some reports of stone throwing.
Roads in central Khartoum were closed and traffic was brought to a standstill.
Leaflets handed out called for an official apology from the Danish government.
"We urge all Muslims around the world to boycott Danish commodities, goods, companies, institutions, organisations and personalities," President Bashir told crowds outside the Republic Palace in Khartoum.
"Not a single Danish foot will from now on desecrate the land of Sudan," he added.
It was not immediately clear how many Danes live in Sudan or if those banned include diplomats.
On Tuesday, Sudan said it had banned the import of Danish goods.
German support
In an interview, Germany's interior minister gave his backing to the Danish newspapers' decision to reprint the cartoons.
"I have respect for the fact that Danish newspapers have now all printed the Muhammad caricatures, on the basis we will not let ourselves to be divided," Wolfgang Schaeuble was quoted as saying by the German weekly news magazine Die Zeit.
"Actually, all European newspapers should now print these caricatures, with the explanation: 'We also find them lousy, but the exercise of press freedom is no reason to practise violence,'" Mr Schaeuble said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7267070.stm
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The awful squeal of fundamentalism
Nick Cohen
The Observer, Sunday March 2 2008
Authoritarians seeking to extend repression have always drawn innocents into manufactured crises. None was more innocent than Jacques Barrot, who, in 2005, helped trigger a wave of death when he entered France's annual pig squealing contest at the Pyrenean village of Trie-sur-Baïse.
Barrot didn't win: that honour went to Yohann and Olivier Roussel for delivering an impressive impersonation of pigs mating. However, history remembers Barrot rather than the Roussels because an Associated Press photographer snapped him wearing a plastic snout standing at the microphone and put it on the news wires.
The next time it appeared, someone had doctored the picture and added the caption: 'Here is the real image of Mohammed.' Two radical imams, whom Denmark had foolishly welcomed as asylum seekers, included it in a dossier they were hawking round the dictatorships of the Middle East, on how Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had insulted Muslims.
After at least 100 deaths and the storming of Danish embassies in Syria and Iran, journalists pointed out that the newspaper hadn't included a picture of M Barrot among the innocuous cartoons it had run to uphold the right to mock religion. The clerics then said an anonymous poison pen writer had sent the wounding picture to a Danish Muslim. It was, they added, an insult to their faith as great as Ayaan Hirsi Ali's championing of the rights of Muslim women.
Too many people forgot too quickly that the violence of 2005 did not have as its 'root cause' the decision of a small Danish newspaper to satirise the godly. For three months after Jyllands-Posten published, there was no rage from the 'Arab street' or any other street. Only after lobbying from the imams and sly political calculation from the powerful did the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) unleash the protests by demanding that the UN impose sanctions on Denmark. Like the Reichstag fire and Sergei Kirov's assassination, the cartoons controversy most suited those who affected to be most outraged.
The mayhem continues. Last month, Danish police arrested suspects allegedly planning to attack a cartoonist. Danish papers reprinted the cartoons as a gesture of solidarity. (As no British editor has had the nerve to run them, I should say nearly every issue of Private Eye has more 'provocative' jokes about Christianity.) The Sudanese government threatened to expel Danish aid workers in retaliation. Sudan is one of the largest recipients of aid from Denmark. If that stops, more will die.
In language filled with the optimism of the struggles against 20th-century totalitarianism, Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.'
But faced with a conflict between high principle and a reactionary stunt, the UN Secretary General chose the side of the hysterics. A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon said that he thought that the new cartoon controversy showed that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly and in a way that respects all religious beliefs'.
All religious beliefs, that is. Even if they do not respect each other. Even if by the normal standards of intellectual life, they make no sense. Even if the behaviour of their followers does not inspire respect, but fear.
If the UN were to order us to 'respect all political beliefs', conservatives would say they weren't prepared to respect communists, leftists would say they weren't prepared to respect fascists and everyone else would burst out laughing. Yet the UN Human Rights Council is proposing in all seriousness to protect religion by doctoring its universal defence of freedom of expression.
The OIC is pushing it to approve a super-blasphemy law that would make it an offence to 'defame' any religion. Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society said attending the discussions was an Orwellian experience, with speakers using the language of liberalism to justify oppression. 'Anyone seeking to draw attention to the capital offence of apostasy in Islamic countries will be lucky to be heard,' he reported. 'Anything deemed the slightest bit critical of Islam is immediately jumped upon.'
To the bafflement of outsiders, communist China and Cuba have joined the states of the Islamic conference. Both are officially atheist and China persecutes its Muslim minority. But what unites dictatorships is more important than what divides them and no one should be surprised that communist elites will use any weapon available to assault principles which threaten their power.
Sitting in Britain, it is easy to feel superior. We can dismiss the UN as a club without rules that negates its own standards by granting membership to countries that break every article in the declaration of human rights.
You need only look around to realise that complacency is unwarranted. Last week, Channel 4 launched a libel action against West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, which had accused its film-makers of inventing all-too-real scenes of clerics preaching misogyny, anti-semitism and homophobia. They must have found accurate investigative reporting disrespectful. The government seeks to deny us the very language we need to describe religious terror and insists civil servants don't call Islamic extremists Islamic extremists but 'anti-Islamic extremists'.
He isn't alone in succumbing to obfuscation and appeasement. The past five years have been among the most shameful in BBC history. It presents tiny groups of extreme right wingers as the authentic voice of Islam while shunning liberal-minded Muslims or asking hard questions of those who would oppress them.
Meanwhile, it is not only authoritarian states at the UN which want a universal blasphemy law. The Archbishop of Canterbury is as keen on criminalising criticism.
AP reported that Yohann and Olivier Roussel triumphed after unleashing a 'cacophony of oinks and grunts'. Why go to Trie-sur-Baïse when you can hear them at home?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/02/muhammadcartoons.religion
--------------------------------------
Price of Notoriety:
Sketch That Roiled
Muslims Is for Sale
Cartoonist Is in Hiding
Amid Death Threats;
Auctioneers Take a Pass
By ANDREW HIGGINS
February 29, 2008; Page A1
AARHUS, Denmark -- Kurt Westergaard is in hiding from Islamic militants who want him dead. Now, the Danish cartoonist says he's ready to part with the source of his travails, a small ink sketch of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
But first there is the ticklish question of price.
"I would like to think that it has some value," says Mr. Westergaard, the 72-year-old creator of one of the world's most famous cartoons and one that inflamed Muslims world-wide. "It is a symbol of democracy and freedom of expression. I think I should have a little money for this," he says.
The drawing is locked in a bank vault while the cartoonist shuttles between temporary havens the Danish secret police have found for him around this blustery port city. His is by far the best known of 12 Muhammad-related cartoons published in September 2005 by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. But how do you fix the value of something that auction houses won't touch, that museums won't hang on their walls and that still inspires murderous passions?
Two weeks ago, Danish authorities said they had foiled a plot to kill Mr. Westergaard in his home. Seventeen Danish newspapers, outraged and eager to show solidarity, reprinted his drawing. Muslims again took to the streets. Iran and others demanded an apology. "I always had a feeling this cartoon crisis would not end," says Mr. Westergaard. "Now I know."
Yet the new round of trouble may only increase the cartoon's worth eventually. "Things gain value from public interest and history," notes Sebastian Lerche, a director of Denmark's biggest auction house, Bruun Rasmussen. He is quick to add he has no interest in testing the market: "We see no point in offending millions of people," he says.
Some Muslims here want the bomb-in-a-turban drawing destroyed. Salah Suleiman, an activist in a mosque that helped whip up the fury over it in early 2006, delights in the artist's troubles and says no amount of money can save him from God's wrath: "He is living like a rat.... He is living in hell already."
Mr. Westergaard's wife, a retired kindergarten teacher, has also suggested destruction, by selling the cartoon to a wealthy Arab who "can then burn it in the central square in Mecca." Mr. Westergaard says he likes the idea of getting money from an oil sheik but would prefer the cartoon stay intact and in Denmark.
Mr. Westergaard says he never intended his drawing to rile Muslims, only to mock extremists who push a deformed reading of their faith. But while arguments rage over whether his cartoon is intolerably offensive or an emblem of free speech, there's no doubt of the prominence it has achieved. Though shunned by most major U.S. publications, it has been reprinted widely in Europe, plastered across the Internet and put on T-shirts. (See the drawing.)
Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Danish paper that first ran the cartoon, compares it to a famous photo of Che Guevara in a beret and to Andy Warhol's pop-art portrait of Marilyn Monroe. "It is a great cultural icon of the 21st century," he says.
Mr. Rose thinks the cartoonist is right to expect compensation beyond the $150 or so he got from his newspaper and about $800 more in Danish reprint fees. It's like a "super hit in the music industry," the editor says: "If you create a hit you get paid."
The Front-Runner
So far, though, the front-runner to acquire this and other Muhammad cartoons is Denmark's Royal Library, which would like to get them free. The library takes no view of the merits of the cartoons and wouldn't put them on display anytime soon. But the institution, whose holdings range from manuscripts of Hans Christian Andersen and Soren Kierkegaard to Scandinavian porn, says it has an obligation to try to acquire items of significance for future generations.
The library says it's in talks with Denmark's Cartoonists Association about acquiring the drawings. The library might be able to get some money for payment, but "this is not the time for big checks," says a spokeswoman, Jytte Kjaergaard, adding that the library won't get into a bidding contest with "capitalist sharks."
Mr. Lerche, the auctioneer, says it's "pure guesswork" what Mr. Westergaard's drawing is worth. A less-famed Muhammad cartoon sold for around $2,900 in an Internet auction, but that was in late 2005, before the global uproar. The artist in that case donated the cash, which came from an anonymous buyer, to earthquake relief in Pakistan.
In an event last year at the Reagan Library in California, Mr. Rose, the Danish culture editor, saw the cartoons' selling power. He autographed posters featuring his newspaper's original cartoon edition, which sold out in minutes for $1,000 apiece.
Money has played a role on the other side of the barricades, too. When Muslims started burning Danish flags and ransacking Danish property in early 2006, extremists joined in a bidding war to get Mr. Westergaard killed. The bounties they offered ranged from a new car to a million dollars.
The cartoonist continued going to work at his small newspaper office, piled with old papers and empty coffee cups. But last November, the danger became real. Denmark's security service uncovered a group it said had diagrams of Mr. Westergaard's house and apparently planned to slit his throat as he slept.
The service offered to send him and his wife on a Caribbean cruise. He declined. "I'm an old man with a stiff neck. I can't bow my head to anyone," he says. Police offered a guard dog. His wife didn't like the idea.
The police moved the couple to a safe place, and agents took over their house in hopes of catching the plotters. When no attack came, police picked up the alleged conspirators, two Tunisians and a Moroccan-born Danish national. The two who aren't Danish citizens are to be deported.
Security Risk
Mr. Westergaard is still in hiding, though he isn't difficult to spot: He wears bright red trousers, red socks and a red scarf. A hotel where he had taken refuge judged him a security risk and demanded he check out.
He hasn't set a price for the drawing that caused all this grief. He says his aim isn't to get rich but to gain recognition for his work and generate a bit of cash for his children and grandchildren.
He has tried to protect his intellectual property, but without much success. Aided by his brother-in-law, a lawyer, he went after an outfit in Holland hawking clothing adorned with his drawing, but the owner vanished. Attempts to find a copyright violator in Germany also fizzled.
"I suppose this is capitalism," he sighs. "You create something and then others exploit it."
The cartoon that now may have him on the run for life is one that Mr. Westergaard, in 2005, did in an hour. "It was just another day at the office," he says.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120423589257000851.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Edited by Luddite (03/02/08 10:02 AM)
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