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Muslim leaders decry Mohammad cartoons, urge peaceful protest
CAIRO |
CAIRO (Reuters) - Muslim and Arab leaders on Wednesday denounced cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a French magazine as another insult to their faith but urged people to shun a violent reaction and to protest peacefully.
The cartoons, featured in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, showed an Orthodox Jew pushing a turbaned figure in a wheelchair on its cover. Several caricatures of the Prophet were included on its inside pages, including some of him naked.
Their publication follows widespread outrage and violent anti-Western protests in many Muslim countries in Africa and Asia in the past week over an anti-Muslim film posted on the Internet.
The Arab League called the cartoons "provocative and outrageous". It said in a statement that they could increase the volatile situation in the Arab and Islamic worlds since the release of the film.
The League appealed to Muslims offended by the cartoons to "use peaceful means to express their firm rejection."
The acting head of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, Essam Erian, said the French judiciary should deal with the issue as firmly as it had handled the case against the magazine which published topless pictures of Britain's Duchess of Cambridge, the wife of Prince William.
"If the case of Kate (the duchess) is a matter of privacy, then the cartoons are an insult to a whole people. The beliefs of others must be respected," he said.
Erian also spoke out against any violent reaction from Muslims but said peaceful protests were justified.
Mahmoud Ghozlan, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, welcomed French government criticism of the cartoons but said that French law should deal with insults against Islam in the same way as it deals with Holocaust denial.
"If anyone doubts the Holocaust happened, they are imprisoned, yet if anyone insults the Prophet, his companions or Islam, the most (France) does is to apologize in two words. It is not fair or logical," he said.
In Lebanon, leading Salafist cleric Sheikh Nabil Rahim said the cartoons could lead to more violence.
"Of course it will anger people further. It will raise tensions that were already dangerously high."
He accused those involved of trying provoke a clash of civilizations, not dialogue.
"We will try to keep things managed and peaceful, but these things easily get out of hand. I fear there could more targeting of foreigners, and this is why I wish they would not persist with these provocations."
Egypt's prestigious Al-Azhar institution for Islamic denounced the cartoons as "spiteful trivialities which promote hatred in the name of freedom".
In Tunisia, Ennahda, a moderate Islamist movement leading the first elected government in the birthplace of the Arab Spring, condemned the cartoons as an "aggression" against Prophet Mohammad.
It urged Muslims to avoid falling into a trap designed by "suspicious parties to derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West" and a conflict amongst Muslims.
In 2005, Danish cartoons of the Prophet caused a wave of violent protests across the Muslim world in which at least 50 people were killed.
(Additional reporting by Marwa Awad, Tom Perry, Ayman Samir, Erika Solomon and Souhail Karam, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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Are the neo-cons, the zionists alongwith some european counterparts combusting the global peace, or again the Muslims will be accused for the spate?
Supposedly responsible Islamic leaders are just so quick to distance themselves and their communities from these atrocities, however, they don’t seem to appreciate that they themselves subscribe to the same basic belief system as their extremist brothers and cousins.
The only difference is that of the extent that apologists will go to in order to proliferate their dogma compared to their fundamentalist counterparts. This then, by definition, labels them as moderates.
Many might think that the relationship stops there but it doesn’t.
As each atrocity is committed, the wider world is shocked. Moderate Muslim leaders and communities repeat their routines of distancing and denial and the cycle continues.
But understand this clearly!
The “forests of moderate Muslims” are the very forests in which the extremists are created, nurtured, and hide, awaiting their opportunities before planning and executing the atrocities that we witness daily throughout our troubled world.
As long as the apologists maintain and legitimise the nurseries of mosques stocked with hate filled Imams, this stream of poisoned minds in the form of terrorists, hijackers, suicide bombers and all forms of insane sub life, will roll off the production lines to service the needs of the Jihad.
Our world is now at the eleventh hour in confronting a problem which is vastly more threatening and sinister than climate change.
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