Wed, Feb 1, 2006 at 9:20:17 am
Don’t look now, but backbones seem to be springing up all over Europe: Germans print Muhammad caricatures. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
Two German newspapers on Wednesday reproduced controversial drawings depicting the Prophet Muhammad, with one of them arguing that a “right to blasphemy” was anchored in democratic freedoms.
The drawings were among several published in a Danish paper in September that sparked outrage and boycotts in Islamic countries. The pictures were also shown in a Norwegian magazine last week. ...
But the German Welt daily put one of the drawings showing the prophet’s turban transformed into a bomb on its front page on Wednesday. It said the picture was “harmless” and expressed regret that the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily had apologized for causing offense.
“Democracy is the institutionalized form of freedom of expression,” the paper said in a front-page commentary. “There is no right to protection from satire in the West; there is a right to blasphemy.”
The Berliner Zeitung daily also printed two of the caricatures as part of its coverage of the controversy.
Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage.
France Soir, Germany’s Die Welt, La Stampa in Italy and El Periodico in Spain all carried some of the drawings.