Europe stands its ground.

The week's news at a glance.

Mohammed Cartoons

We reprinted the Mohammed cartoons out of solidarity with our Danish colleagues, said Barcelona’s El Periódico de Catalunya in an editorial. The Danish paper Jyllands-Posten commissioned 12 caricatures of Islam’s founder specifically to make a point about free speech, after a Danish author complained that no artist would illustrate his children’s book about Mohammed. Islam does not allow representations of the Prophet, and cartoonists feared that imams would target them with the same kind of death fatwa that sent author Salman Rushdie into hiding during the 1990s. Turns out their fears were justified: After the newspaper ran the images, Muslims across the world hurled death threats and burned Danish embassies. Muslims have every right to be upset—some of the caricatures are offensive in that they equate Islam with terrorism. “But they’ve no right to try to suppress criticism abroad, or threaten those who have bad taste in satire.”

We might take these Muslim protests more seriously, said Roger Köppel in Hamburg’s Die Welt, “if they weren’t so hypocritical.” Arab newspapers routinely print cartoons of Jews—sometimes generic rabbis, sometimes recognizable politicians—as “ravenous cannibals” with the blood of Arab babies dripping from their fangs. Evidently perpetrating the old blood libel is all in good fun. How many imams raised even mild criticism when Arab television stations ran a series based on the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”? Freedom of expression is “a core value of the West.” We will not allow Muslim mobs to dictate what European newspapers can and can’t print.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Guardian