OIC warns of ‘bigger conflict’
ISTANBUL (AFP) – The Organisation of the Islamic Conference denounced Friday the reprinting of a profane Danish cartoon of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), warning it could lead to confrontations between Muslims and Christians.
“By reprinting these cartoons we are heading towards a bigger conflict and that shows that both sides will be hostages of their radicals,” OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, a Turk, told AFP in Istanbul.
“It is not a way of improving your rights and exercising your freedoms when you use these rights for insulting the most sacred values and symbols of others and inciting hatred,” he said.
“This is a very wrong, provocative way – unacceptable.”
“The people who are doing this put themselves with the radicals, the fanatics and extremists who are using their beliefs as justification to hurt others,” Ihsanoglu said. “This is not the way to improve relations between East and West, between Islam and Christianity.”
The drawing, which depicts Mohammed with a turban resembling a bomb with a lit fuse, triggered fresh uproar in Muslim countries.
The Jeddah-based OIC is the world’s largest pan-Islamic body, with 57 members.
Meanwhile, hundreds of people in the Gaza Strip joined a Hamas rally on Friday against Danish newspapers that reprinted a blasphemous cartoon depicting the Holy Prophet (PBUH).
Speaking to the crowd in the northern town of Jabaliya, Hamas MP Yussef Sharafi called on the Danish government to “apologise to Muslims for the offence to the Holy Prophet.”
On Thursday, Hamas condemned the newspapers and called for those responsible to be put on trial.
A number of Danish newspapers published the profane cartoon on Wednesday, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after Danish police foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.
Hamas said publication of the cartoon was an “offence to the feelings of tens of millions of Muslims.
“We call for the trial of those responsible for publishing these drawings in the Danish newspapers,” Hamas said, demanding that “official apologies be made” to Muslims.
On Tuesday, Danish police arrested a Dane of Moroccan origin and two Tunisians suspected of plotting to kill the creator of the turban cartoon, Kurt Westergaard.
