Results matching “newspapers published mohammed c”

Following the International Press Institute (IPI) world congress in Belgrade, where a session focused on the limits of tolerance and the issue of publishing blasphemous content, such as the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark, IPI will make a programme-length video about the issue of blasphemy.

This is a good initiative in the wake of the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed by 17 Danish newspapers, three years after the initial row.

"Deciding where to draw the line, or whether there should be a line, would be a major step forward, if it's done in a sensitive and sensible way," wrote the Guardian's Roy Greenslade.

The debate between proponents of unrestricted press freedom and those who advise cautious self-censorship will undoubtedly drag on, but IPI's initiative may help to throw light on these issues.

UPDATE: A Danish appeals court rejected today a suit filed by seven Muslim organizations against the editors of the Jyllands-Posten, which first published the Mohammed cartoons in 2005. The court found that the most controversial of the cartoons, depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, was "of a satirical nature" and "does not refer to Muslims in general or to the (plaintiff) organisations or their members," reported the AFP. The court also stated "that terrorist acts have been committed in the name of Islam, and it is not illegal for these acts to be made the object of satirical representation."

Source: Roy Greenslade

Yesterday, Egypt suspended the sale of four western newspapers for featuring pictures it considers offensive to Islam. An order issued by Information Minister Anas al-Fiqi, forbade the distribution of Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt, Britain's Observer and the US Wall Street Journal, the official MENA news agency reported.

"Any newspaper or magazine which publishes anything offensive to the Prophet...and reprints the offensive caricatures of the prophet or anything offensive to the three heavenly religions will be banned," Fiqi said.

The ban comes in response to the recent Danish newspaper scandal in which 17 of the country’s papers published a controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban.

Source: AFP

A day after police thwarted a murder plot against, Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist responsible for a controversial cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb-shaped turban, 17 Danish newspapers printed the aforementioned drawing.

Three of the country’s largest newspapers were among those to reprint the cartoon today.  Editors staunchly defended their freedom of expression and refused to censor the content—noting that they would not be intimidated by fanatics, reports editorandpublisher.com.

The cartoon, considered offensive by numerous Muslims, was one of a series of 12 caricatures published in Sept. 2005 by daily Jyllands-Posten. Violent protests ensued in several Muslim countries in Jan. and Feb. 2006.

Danish police claimed to have arrested three people yesterday—a Dane of Moroccan origin and two Tunisian nationals in relation to the murder plot.

When asked why they chose to reprint the cartoon, the newspapers explained that they were demonstrating their right to publish uncensored material.

"Freedom of expression gives you the right to think, to speak and to draw what you like ... no matter how many terrorist plots there are," conservative broadsheet Berlingske Tidende wrote in an editorial.

Westergaard has lived in hiding for the past three months while the Danish press has maintained that it has “unanimously condemned the alleged murder plot against the cartoonist.”

The Danish Muslim community has attempted to dissociate themselves from the murder plot but have expressed disapproval of the cartoon’s publication today.

Imam Walid Abdoul Pedersen, a Protestant who converted to Islam, said: "It's not a good idea to reproduce it and the newspapers could have defended the cartoonist differently, without resorting to provocation."

Pedersen explained that while a dialogue on freedom of expression would be beneficial, perhaps the newspapers’ confrontational manner of provoking discussion, in printing the cartoon, was not the most productive.
 
The Danish foreign ministry has been forced to remain sensitive to the issue since the 2006 controversy sparked Danish flag burnings and international protests.

Source: AFP Mail – Editor & Publisher
 

In his Regret The Error blog, Canadian freelancer Craig Silverman comes back on some of the media’s most noticed mistakes during 2007: among the top were mistakes about US politician Barack Obama, but also a Titanic picture rip-off that went around the world before being caught.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt appealed for calm, after Al-Qaeda issued a death warrant on two journalists following the publication of controversial cartoons of Prophet Mohammed.

The Moroccan government took serious action by banning the weekly Nichane, due to “offense against Islam.” A highly unusual procedure in an Islamic State that’s usually on the moderate side of religious governments.

Editor of weekly newspaper Al-Rai Al-Aam Kamal Al-Olufi will spend one year in jail for having printed an image of the website of Danish Jylland Posten, where some of the famous Mohammed cartoons were visible. The paper has been ordered to stop publication for six months.

On 19 October 2006, French broadcaster France 2 won a libel case over accusations it faked a report into the killing of Mohammed Al-Dura, a Palestinian boy whose death in 2000 became a symbol of the uprising known as the second intifada. The Court of First Instance in Paris ordered Philippe Karsenty, director of Media Ratings, a website that comments on the media, to pay France 2 and its Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin symbolic damages of one euro each. Immediately, Media Ratings made an appeal and there will be a new lawsuit.

French media - especially newspapers - supported a lot France Televisions (see former posting) and its journalist during the last six years. The Editors Weblog prefers to ask the other part about the consequences of this - first - judgment and what it reveals about fairness in French media.

Lessons from the Mohammed cartoon clash will be the focus of the fifth session of the 13th World Editors Forum, which begins June 4 in Moscow. On 30 September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. Sixteen years after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and his "Satanic Verses," the clash between freedom of expression and religious values exploded once more. Panelists will discuss if there are limits for press freedom and how media responsibility can work in a globalized world. Don’t miss this special panel focused on 2006’s most fascinating editorial debate.

The Mohammed cartoons are still sparking controversy, as Canada’s largest book retailer pulled all copies of a magazine containing the drawings from its shelves.

Ever hear of Bluffton, South Carolina?  If you are a newspaper professional, you should know about this small US community of 15,000 people, where a new model for newspapers and newspaper web sites is succeeding.

Muslim attorney Junaid Afeef has chosen to defend suspended student editor Acton Gordon, of the University of Illinois newspaper The Daily Illini - which published a number of the infamous Mohammed cartoons, in a bid to "fight for First Amendment rights."

The Danish newspaper at the heart of the Mohammed cartoon clash has agreed to discuss the controversy in a special session at the World Editors Forum conference to be held in Moscow in June. A senior representative of Jyllands-Posten, which published the cartoons that set off a furore in the Islamic world, will take part in a panel discussion of "Lessons from the Mohammed cartoon clash" at the World Editors Forum, which runs concurrently with the World Newspaper Congress from 4 to 7 June next.

The British and American press are faced with an editorial decision. An overwhelming majority of their newspapers declined to publish the Mohammed cartoons claiming that the images were too offensive to Muslims among numerous other excuses. Now, the French Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten, the same Danish daily that commissioned the cartoons, have printed a manifesto signed by 12 well-known academics and writers including Salman Rushdie, that is undoubtedly anti-Islamist Extremist and will certainly be interpreted by some in the global Muslim community as clear evidence that the West is prejudice against them. So, if Muslims find this manifesto offensive, how will the British and American press report on it?

Jyllands Posten, the Danish newspaper at the centre of the Mohammed cartoons row, today translated and reprinted a manifesto entitled "Together facing the new totalitarianism" published in French political satire weekly Charlie Hebdo, asserting that other European newspapers will also publish the document (for the moment we know of only two publications that have printed the Manifesto: Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands Posten). It begins "After having overcome fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism."

The document also calls for "resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of ... secular values for all," and asserts that "The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values ... Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism."

The British National Party (BNP) has distributed a leaflet including one of the 12 Mohammed cartoons, originally published in Danish paper Jyllands Posten, that have caused outrage amongst Muslims worldwide. In the pamphlet the cartoon was displayed next to a photograph of Muslim demonstrators calling for violent punishment of the cartoonists who authored the images.

A newspaper in Saudi Arabia has stopped publishing after printing some of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad according to BBC Monitoring. "Al-Shams (The Sun) has been suspended as part of an investigation into its decision to publish the cartoons that have caused anger across the Muslim world (see other Muslim newspapers closed in this former posting).

It printed them next to articles urging Saudis to take action against Denmark where the cartoons first appeared. Three weeks ago, Al-Shams became one of few newspapers in the Arab world to print some of the cartoons."

Three cartoonists, Dilem (Ali Dilem) of Algeria’s daily newspaper Liberty, Cabu (Jean Cabu) of France’s Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard Enchainé (both political satire weeklies) and Iran’s Nikahang Kowsar have answered questions about their own perspectives on the Mohammed cartoons and freedom of expression.

Each cartoonist has a different perspective. Dilem asserts that people should be "allowed to make cartoons of everything", while simultaneously stating that he understands how a cartoon depicting Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb has shocked some people. Kowsar criticizes the publication of the cartoons, stating: "I am critical of what they did: when you do something that you know will create hatred and annoy people who are a minority in Europe, this can be very insensitive." Finally, Cabu defends the publication of the cartoons, asserting that Nikahansuch actions are protected by freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

As a result of our former survey about the number of newspapers which published the Danish Mohammed cartoons, it appears that there were not two or three but twelve different ways to cover the story:

1) No reproduction of the cartoons but a short text describing them and no link to the cartoons in the website. It was the choice of more than 1,400 American newspapers.

2) No reproduction of the cartoons but link to the cartoons (often Wikipedia) in the website. It implies a certain sense of hypocrisy - are the online readers more clever than the usual readers? - but many English newspapers thought it was relevant.

India's newspapers have reported that Mohammed Yaqoob Qureshi, a minister in northern Uttar Pradesh state government, has offered a bounty of $11.5 million to anyone who decapitates one of the Danish cartoonists who authored 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, published in Jyllands Posten in September 2005.

This is the first time we are asking for your feedback, but this is important.

Just on your right, you can read an article whose headline is "MEDIA GEOPOLITICS OF THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS". This is about the newspapers which published the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Could you check this list?

If something is wrong or is missing (a newspaper or a country), please let us know in the "comment area" at the bottom of the article

Thanks in advance,

The Editors Weblog team

 The Editors' Weblog has compiled a provisional list of the newspapers that have printed some or all of the cartoons since 30 September 2005, date of publication of 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Even provisional, this list is the most exhaustive on the internet, thanks to members of the World Editors Forum and to bloggers close to the EW.

The main conclusions are:

- to our knowledge, more than 130 national or local newspapers (excluding the student newspapers and online publications) published some or all of the 12 cartoons (sometimes just a pohtography) in approximately 50 countries . It also means that around 1,7% of the dailies around the world - 8,300 paid-for dailies according to World Press Trends 2005 - made the difficult decision to publish the cartoons.

- Europe was the continent where the most newspapers published the cartoons: at least 70 papers. It is not surprising that the Netherlands was the country most involved in the controversy (after Denmark)... a few months after the assassination of the film maker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist activist. Same thing in France after the veil debate and the November 2005 riots.

- Within Europe, the first publications to reprint the cartoons in January-February 2006 were in general right-wing publications, for example ABC in Spain, Die Welt in Germany and Corriere della Sera in Italy. Then more leftist publications followed suit, for example Libération and Le Monde in France.

- Surprisingly, Arab and Muslim newspapers were also involved in the controversy from the very beginning, with the first reprint on 17 October 2005 (see below)! More than 12 Arab and/or Muslim newspapers published the cartoons. The decision to publish provoked terrible consequences for the editors-in-chief of these publications. Same consequences for some directors of television in Sudan and Algeria. 

- How to define the position adopted by American, British, Canadian and Australian newspapers? Media responsability, political correctness or self-censorship? The most surprising is not the position defined in many editorials (from The New York Times to The Guardian), but this strange impression of unanimity and consensus: only three regional newspapers on more than 1,400 newspapers in the States and zero newspaper, but a student daily in the UK for taking the risk...

- And what in the rest of the world? Nothing. Almost the desert for the publication of the cartoons in the Americas (apart Brazil), Africa (apart South Africa) and above all Asia (apart New Zealand). As if this controversy was only between Europe and the Arab world and if blasphemy was still relevant in regions as Asia and the Americas: not only about Mohammed, but about all religious issues.

My conclusion: the geography of the publication of the Danish cartoons tells us a lot about our democracies: what is allowed, what is forbidden... and what is taboo. In fact, it's more geopolitics than geography!

Esteemed American cartoonist Art Spiegelman emphasised, in an interview published in French regional paper Sud Ouest, the importance of "preserving a free press that has the right to insult." He added, however, that what he felt was problematic about the Danish cartoon affair was the fact that the cartoons were published in a newspaper "which is politically situated between Sarkozy and Le Pen."

Illustration: "Mohammed the Prophet / The Fanatism", a tragedy written by Voltaire in 1741. Edition of the complete works of Voltaire, 1846, Société des publications illustrées (drawing by Moreau).

I love old books, but I didn't know one day I would be obliged to go to my bookcase to argue about press freedom, media responsability and the current Mohammed cartoons row. Last year in November 2005 I was already surprised that some French and Swiss Islamic organisations contested the live performance of Voltaire's play. For them, the tragedy was an insult against the Prophet and they asked - without success - that the play cease to be performed. But police had to protect the actors, the director Hervé Loichemol and the audience*...

No major UK newspapers have so far published any of the infamous 12 Mohammed cartoons. The general consensus amongst UK newspapers was that while freedom of speech must exist and be preserved, simultaneously there is no need to insult and provoke people. In an opinion piece published in the Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins went as far as to say: "These cartoons don't defend free speech they threaten it."