Australia was drawn on Monday into the widespread anger over cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad after a weekend newspaper printed one of the images.
The president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, Ameer Ali, urged newspapers not to print the cartoons, which Muslims say are blasphemous and contrary to Islamic tradition prohibiting depictions of the prophet.
”Which is more important: to preserve the freedom of speech or to antagonise one-fifth of humanity?” Ali told ABC radio.
Ali said imams in Australia are already delivering sermons saying that publishing the cartoons will ”only create more [Osama] Bin Ladens”.
The caricatures originally appeared in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten last year and recent reprinting elsewhere has sparked death threats, kidnappings, boycotts of Norwegian products and, at the weekend, attacks on the Danish embassies in Beirut and Damascus.
Brisbane’s Courier Mail printed one of the 12 cartoons at the weekend, prompting calls for an apology from Queensland’s state Islamic Council.
”I was hoping, praying that our media people would have more — I hate to use the word — more sense in not trying to agitate the situation in the local scene here in Australia,” council president Abdul Jalal said.
Editors of major dailies in Sydney and Melbourne said they are unlikely to publish the cartoons.
In Sydney, the editor of the tabloid Daily Telegraph, David Penberthy, said it would be unwise to print the caricatures given recent racial tensions between white Australians and Lebanese youths on Sydney’s Cronulla beach.
”I don’t know whether people would really want to take the risk of that level of social unrest,” Penberthy told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio.
Sydney Morning Herald editor Alan Oakley said that as detailed descriptions of the cartoons have already been published, there is no need to print them.
”To have a debate about pornography, you don’t have to publish pornographic pictures,” Oakley told ABC radio. ”You can have a sensible discussion around this without publishing the images.”
Melbourne Herald-Sun editor Peter Blunden said his tabloid will not publish the cartoons because of the risk of protest.
The issue has raised debate about freedom of the press, with opposition Labour Party spokesperson Kevin Rudd saying decisions on publishing the cartoons should be made only on editorial grounds.
”This is a free country. We should not be stood over by any group, including militant Islamist groups,” Rudd said. ”These decisions should be taken on their journalistic merits by Australia’s news media. We should not be kowtowing to anybody when it comes to freedom in this country.”
Australian political commentator Tim Blair has published the full set of cartoons on his website, saying there are more vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Christian publications available from Islamic bookstores.
”Odd that this concern over maintaining the peace doesn’t limit Muslim commentary on other religions or communities,” Blair said on his website. ”Far from being against hate speech, many Muslim spokesmen seem to be aggressively for it.” — Sapa-AFP