Cair says European papers have been gratuitously insulting

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair), said American newspapers have not printed the cartoons as in Europe, perhaps because they feel secure in their constitutional free press protections.

He said: "They don't feel the need to go out and be gratuitously insulting just to prove that they can do it, which is what the European media seem to be doing in almost a childish overreaction."

American newspapers gave extensive coverage to the hurt and anger that cartoons of Prophet Muhammad provoked across the world but took a hands-off approach to reprinting the caricatures themselves.

John Diaz, editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, said: "I don't see it as a necessity to run them.

"There's a lot of ways that we can gratuitously offend our readers. We want to avoid that."

Blasphemy

Islam forbids images of any of God's prophets and so Muslims consider the cartoons printed in Europe as blasphemous.

One of the cartoons depicted Prophet Muhammad with a turban resembling a bomb.

Leonard Downie Jr, the Washington Post's executive editor, said the paper is covering the controversy over the cartoons but not reprinting them because "the very nature of depicting Muhammad editorially is not an ambiguous question. Either you do it or you don't."

"It's never a concern over reactions. It's a concern over what the Washington Post decides to publish. We're maintaining our standards."

Newspapers in the United States and Canada have described the cartoons and carried pictures of readers in Europe scanning them in publications there.

The images were first published in September in a Danish newspaper, and reprinted by a Norwegian magazine on 10 January, the day Muslims were celebrating Eid al-Adha, one of the most significant days in the Islamic calendar.

Giles Gherson, the Toronto Star's editor-in-chief, said it was unlikely the paper would run an editorial cartoon that was "gratuitously offensive," to a segment of the population.

Preferred approach

Once that cartoon becomes global news, however, the question arises as to whether it needs to be reprinted so readers can understand what is going on, he said in an article carried in the newspaper.

"We're going to describe in text the cartoons. We're going to see if we can explain to our readers what the issues are, what happened, what is portrayed in the cartoons, without actually showing the cartoons if they are inherently deeply offensive to a segment of our society. That would be our preferred approach."

US Muslim response

The controversy has also produced a muted response generally among US Muslims, who make up less than 2% of the population by most estimates. Leaders say their communities are clearly upset though there have not been demonstrations or noisy public outcries.

Abdul Malik Mujahid, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organisations of Greater Chicago, said: "Some people are feeling hurt but they also see it as part of the overall Islamaphobia in the media."

He questioned whether an anti-Semitic cartoon or one showing the Roman Catholic pope in a compromising sexual position would have been tolerated in Europe the way the cartoons of the prophet were by those who published them.

"Islamaphobia … is hurting us as a society. We are becoming less open to listen to the voices of dissent and voices which are different."

Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, also said there is a double standard among political leaders, opinion makers and the media. There would have been a "tremendous, correct response" if the cartoons had been anti-Semitic, he said.

US Muslims, he said, are unlikely to take to the streets in outrage.

"We admonish against that because we don't find it helpful to our situation in America," he said.

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