Source: Compiled by Daily Star, 16-02-2008
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) denounced on Friday the reprinting of a Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad, warning it could lead to confrontations between Muslims and Christians. "By reprinting these cartoons we are heading toward a bigger conflict and that shows that both sides will be hostages of their radicals," OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, a Turk, said in Istanbul. The Jeddah-based OIC is the world's largest pan-Islamic body, with 57 members.
"It is not a way of improving your rights and exercising your freedoms when you use these rights for insulting the most sacred values and symbols of others and inciting hatred," he said. "This is a very wrong, provocative path - unacceptable."
Several Danish newspapers on Wednesday republished one of 12 drawings after police uncovered an alleged plot in Denmark to kill the cartoonist of one of the drawings.
"The people who are doing this put themselves with the radicals, the fanatics and extremists who are using their beliefs as justification to hurt others," Ihsanoglu said. "This is not the way to improve relations between East and West, between Islam and Christianity."
The drawing, which depicts Mohammad with a turban resembling a bomb with a lit fuse, triggered fresh uproar in Muslim countries this week.
Hundreds of people in the Gaza Strip joined a Hamas rally on Friday against newspapers that reprinted the cartoon.
Speaking to the crowd in the northern town of Jabaliya, Hamas MP Yussef Sharafi called on the Danish government to "apologize to Muslims for the offence to the prophet."
On Thursday, Hamas condemned the newspapers and called for those responsible to be put on trial.
The original publication of the 12 cartoons in September 2005 by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper triggered bloody riots across the Islamic world.
A Hamas statement said publication of the cartoon was an "offence to the feelings of tens of millions of Muslims."
"We call for the trial of those responsible for publishing these drawings in the Danish newspapers," the organization said, demanding that "official apologies be made."
Hundreds rallied in Pakistan as well, burning an effigy of the Danish premier Friday in protest at the cartoon's reprinting.
Chanting "Death to the cartoonist," protesters in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and other locations demanded that the Pakistani government cut diplomatic relations with Denmark and boycott Danish goods.
"The punishment for blasphemy in Islam is death," Islamist leader Hafiz Hamidullah told a student rally in northwestern Peshawar, where about 500 students demonstrated.
In the port city of Karachi, students staged a rally outside a medical college while another rally by a religious party later burned the effigy of Danish Premier Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
Dozens of students from the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami party thrashed a dummy of the cartoonist and then set it ablaze at a demonstration in the central city of Multan, joined by about 150 local traders.
The participants chanted slogans against US President George W. Bush and criticized the government of President Pervez Musharraf for not taking up the issue with Danish authorities.