n an interview from Miami. He spent months living under police protection in Denmark. […]
In Norrebro, an ethnically mixed neighborhood of Copenhagen where the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard is buried and where kebab stands dot the tree-lined streets, Imam Ahmed Abu-Laban, a leader among Denmark’s Muslims, bristles at what he calls the “Islam phobia” gripping the country. He asserted that the cartoons had been calculated to incite Muslims because it was well known that in Islam depictions of the prophet were considered blasphemy.
“We are being mentally tortured,” Imam Ahmed said at his mosque, an anonymous building that looks more like an apartment complex than a house of worship. “The cartoons are an insult against Islam, an attempt by right-wing forces in this country to get a rise out of the Muslim community and so portray us as against Danish values.”
The latest post on the subject at Brussels Journal (scroll down for the full list of their posts on this) notes, among other things, the way this is being being reported in the Muslim press: in Egypt apparently they’re saying that Danish newspapers are waging a campaign against Islam, that Copenhagen plans to introduce a state-censored version of the Koran, that a Danish film is underway “to show how horrible Islam is”, and that there were 120 cartoons, not 12.
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