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Danish Muslims want "court's word"
in cartoons crisis
COPENHAGEN, March 31, 2006 – Danish Muslims have filed a lawsuit against mass-circulation Jyllands Posten for printing cartoons that lampooned Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him).
"Now the wronged have to use all legal measures to get the court's word and not just a government official on whether the Jyllands-Posten's cartoons and article were legal," Michael Christiani Havemann, the lawyer representing the Copenhagen-based European Committee for Honoring the Prophet, which groups 27 organizations, said Thursday, March 30, in a statement carried by Reuters.
The lawsuit comes two weeks after Denmark's top prosecutor decided not to press criminal charges against the paper for publishing the cartoons.
Henning Fode argued that the paper did not violate the Danish freedom of expression laws by commissioning and printing the cartoons.
Last September, the daily ran 12 cartoons including portrayals of the Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban and another showing him as a knife-wielding nomad flanked by shrouded women.
The lawyer argues in his case that the cartoons depicted Prophet Muhammad as "belligerent, oppressing women, criminal, crazy and unintelligent, and a connection is made between the Prophet and terror," according to the Associated Press.
He said the cartoons were published "solely to provoke and mock not only Prophet Muhammad but also the Muslim population."
The drawings, considered blasphemous under Islam, have triggered massive and sometimes violent demonstrations across the Muslim world and strained the Muslim-West ties.
Fine: The lawsuit, filed in the western city of Aarhus where the Posten is based, sought $16,100 in damages from the daily's editor-in-chief Carsten Juste and culture editor Flemming Rose, who commissioned the drawings.
"We're seeking judgment for both the text and the drawings which were gratuitously defamatory and injurious," Havemann told the AP.
Danish Muslims have said they were planning to take the Prophet cartoons to the United Nations after the prosecutor's snub.
The paper and the Danish government have repeatedly refused to apologize for publishing the cartoons.
The daily has always defended its action as being in accordance with the freedom of expression principle entrenched in the Danish constitution.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and European External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner recently suggested that the EU and the Organization of the Islamic Conference co-draft a UN resolution promoting religious tolerance.
The OIC and the Arab League, the Muslim world's two main political bodies, are seeking a UN resolution, backed by possible sanctions, to protect religions following the publication of the provocative cartoons. (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies)
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2006-03/31/article03.shtml
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