The bravest man in Jordan

While newspaper editors in Canada, the United States and Britain have refrained from showing the Muhammed cartoons, three of them were shown in the Jordanian tabloid Al-Shihan. Not surprisingly, editor Jihad Momani was immediately fired:

Newspapers in Cairo chastised the European press. "It is a conspiracy against Islam and Muslims that has been in the works for years," said Al Gumhuriya, a top state-owned daily.

Going against the flow, the Jordanian tabloid Al Shihan defiantly published three of the cartoons. Its publishing company later pulled all copies from the newsstands and fired the paper's editor in chief, Jihad Momani.

"Muslims of the world, be reasonable," Momani had written in an editorial alongside the cartoons, including the one that showed Prophet Mohammed with the bomb-shaped turban.

Before he was fired, Momani said that he decided to publish the offending cartoons "so people know what they are protesting about ... People are attacking drawings that they have not even seen."

But the Jordanian government condemned the newspaper's move. A government spokesman Nasser Jawdeh demanded "an immediate apology from the newspaper for this serious error", adding that the paper could face sanctions, according to Jordan's Petra news agency.

Elsewhere, the rage and seething shows no signs of letting up. Ken Livingstone's pal, Sheikh Yussef al-Qaradawi, is calling for an "international day of anger" in protest against the affront toward the Religion of Peace(TM):

A leading Islamic cleric called for an "international day of anger" today over publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, and a Danish activist predicted that deadly violence could break out in Europe "at any minute".
[...]
A leading hard-line Muslim cleric, Sheikh Yussef al-Qaradawi, called for the day of anger to protest against the printing of the cartoons - first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September - in other European papers.

"Let Friday be an international day of anger for God and his prophet," said the sheikh, who is the head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars. He is one of the Arab world's most popular television preachers and made a controversial visit to London in July 2004 as a guest of the mayor, Ken Livingstone.

This has gone way beyond a few cartoons. It's about whether free societies will be forced into self-censorship because of threats and violence from religious fanatics. The Danish Prime Minister puts it best:

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark, told the Danish newspaper Politiken that the issue had gone beyond a row between Copenhagen and the Muslim world and now centred on western free speech versus taboos in Islam. He said: "We are talking about an issue with fundamental significance to how democracies work."

Posted by damian at February 3, 2006 07:39 AM | TrackBack