Cartoons
Prophet
Free speech =
cheap insults a violence which should be - vigorously opposed), is counNeither Call this be achieved through attacks on Treedom of expression which only no crease the powers of the states behind the war drive and will inevitably be turned against the Muslim community (as glimpsed in the "trial" of Ken Livingstone).
That freedom of speech needs to be defended has been vividly illustrated recently.
At least eight newspapers have been closed by the governments of Jordan, Malaysia, Yemen and Algeria -journalists and editors being sacked and in many cases arrested. • In Libya, security forces shot dead eleven protestors trying to storm an Italian consulate after Italian Minister Roberto Calderoli appeared on television wearing a T-shirt bearing the cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. • In Pakistan, a $1 million bounty was placed on the head of the cartoonist; protestors set fire to a church in Sindh province; there were clashes in Islamabad when security forces tried to block a rally by the fundamentalist Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal; and Danes engaged in earthquake assistance were forced to leave the country. • In Indonesia, 400 members of the Islamic Defenders Front attacked the US embassy bearing a banner reading "we are ready to attack the enemies of the prophet". — In northern Nigeria, protests led to dozens of deaths, destroyed 30 churches and left thousands homeless. At least 20 Muslims were then killed in retaliation after the country's Anglican primate warned Muslims that they did not have a "monopoly on violence" and that "restive youth" could not be contained. • In Britain two large peaceful marches on successive weekends followed a picket in which the antics of a handful of Muslim fundamentalists were sensationalised by the media. Meanwhile, the fascist BNP plan to distribute campaign leaflets featuring the cartoons. WE REGRET the fact that a technical glitch deleted a few lines from our introduction to the article on the cartoons issue in our last issue (no. 32, page 2), which made clear that the article was not written or endorsed by Socialist Resistance, but a state. ment from the Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom, which we published to start a discussion.