27 January 2006 Blog Home : January 2006 : Permalink
Dear Minster of Cultural affairs (Norway)
Dear Minster of Cultural affairs (Denmark)
The Muslim world has been following with anger and sorrow the humiliating cartoons that were published for the Nobel Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Jyllands Posten newspaper (Denmark) and Magazinet newspaper (Norway).
In Islam, embodying Prophet Mohammad PBUH in a picture, drawing or a statue is completely prohibited; even within a context of showing respect, admiration or recognition. As a result, and as you may have found out already, drawing Prophet Mohammed within a negative attitude and picturing him as a person representing evil force does firmly form a sever compound and complicated act of aggression conducted against our believes, hearts, minds and souls. Muslims can hardly think of any worse cultural harassment!
We strongly believe in freedom of _expression and freedom of press. However, what was published in those two newspapers is inappropriate and goes beyond freedom of _expression. It humiliates, without any reason or purpose, approximately one billion Muslims who consider Prophet Muhammad as the messenger of mercy.
We forward you this letter to express our strong condemnation for what was published and we hope your respect to others' beliefs and religious symbols will motivate you to condemn these drawings and make sure that they will not be published once again because publishing them again will cause more tensions between nations, will harm Muslims' feelings and their beliefs
It would be unfair to note or criticise the spelling errors, seeing as I can neither read nor write a word of Arabic, however even once one gets past that there are plenty of things that make you realise that we have a long way to go.Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and shew mercy unto thousands in them that love me, and keep my commandments.
And hence, just as the Calvinists and Puritans rejected the decorative Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions and proudly destroyed art both religious and secular, so too do the stricter forms of Islam.Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye.
The result of this miscomprehension of degees of harassment means that "It humiliates, without any reason or purpose, approximately one billion Muslims who consider Prophet Muhammad as the messenger of mercy" makes some sort of sense. Again this is flat out wrong in any other setting.what really beats me is the fact that i assume the muslim countries dont understand the whole essense about freedom to. How can they understand something they never have tried themselves. if they tasted freedom then they would maybe understand.
In another thread a Mohamed Talaat from Egypt shows how the issue is completely misunderstood:if danish government still firm and refuse to give apology and not response to this case that because muslims are weak but if this case done with jewish people i am sure the prime minister and king of this country called danemark would apology and kiss hands of jewishes because they have the buzz all over the world and the prime minister would not talk about freedom of speech or any thing like that but will talk about burning of jewish in 2nd world war because this world like the wood don't know any thing but force ....ok.
Not only does this miss the point it is demonstrably untrue. I don't know enough about Denmark to know if there are as many anti-semites there that plague the rest of Europe but google seems to show that there are (and that many of the more recent incidents are caused by Muslims) and that they have been around for a long time - despite the Danish resistance to the Nazis - and some are leading Christians:...Anders Gadegaard, who holds a leading position in the Church, on 30 December 2001 gave a sermon in Copenhagen’s main church which had a clear anti-Semitic tendency. It was later transmitted to the official website of the church under the headline: "Children are still killed in Bethlehem by the authorities who fear the demands for justice and freedom by the oppressed population." The sermon took as its starting point the episode related in the New Testament about King Herod, who ordered all children below the age of two to be killed in order to prevent the emergence of the Messiah, who the three wise men had said was born in Bethlehem. From here Gadegaard went straight to modern events with the words: "On TV we watched the terrible pictures, which went around the world, of a little boy and his father in Ramallah (sic!) who was caught in Israeli (!) crossfire, and defenseless people begging for their lives but shot in cold blood."
Not only did the priest give an untrue and distorted picture of the death of Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza on 30 September 2000, he supplemented it with further invented details, thereby strengthening the defamation of Israel. He linked it to the story from the Gospels about the wicked Jewish king Herod, thereby reviving centuries-old Christian anti-Semitism that had been forgotten in Denmark.