Haaretz
Shvat 5, 5766
Senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar met Thursday
with Gaza's Latin Bishop Manuel Musalam to confirm that the Islamic
organization would provide protection for the entire Christian community
in the coastal territory.
Al-zahar's comments comes as Palestinian
gunmen across the Palestinian territories threatened violence and demanded
an apology for caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that appeared in
European newspapers. In one incident, a German citizen was kidnapped by
gunmen and shortly released in the town of Nablus.
While visiting
the Holy Family school in Gaza, A-Zahar told Bishop Musalam, "Hamas is
ready to place the Izz al-Din al-Qassam ¬militant wing¬ at churches and
schools across Gaza until the authority of the Palestinian police is
transferred to the new government".
The gesture is seen as one of a
myriad of attempts by the Islamic organization to assert its control and
gain legitimacy after winning a landslide victory in last week's
Palestinian Legislative Elections, beating out President Mahmoud Abbas's
leading Fatah party.
Palestinian Authority security officials said
that gunmen from a militant faction in Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah
faction seized Christoph Kasten, 21, from a hotel coffee shop in the city
of Nablus and took him to an empty field before releasing him.
The
rare kidnapping in the West Bank took Muslim anger to a new level in a
controversy over balancing Western freedom of the press with religious
sensibilities.
Islamic tradition prohibits realistic depictions of
prophets, and considers caricatures of them blasphemous.
Elsewhere
in Nablus, armed Palestinians shut down a French cultural center,
witnesses said.
Foreign diplomats and journalists began pulling
out of the Palestinian areas and two countries closed diplomatic offices
Thursday after masked Palestinian gunmen threatened to kidnap
foreigners.
Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank were reported
searching several hotels and apartments for foreigners to kidnap, and
militants in Gaza briefly surrounded the local office of the EU
Commission. Some Palestinian shoppers said they would boycott European
products.
Earlier Thursday, Norway closed its representative office
in the West Bank to the public after receiving threats from armed groups
in the region angered by the publishing of cartoons that depicted the
prophet Mohammed in a Norwegian newspaper. The office's staff, however,
remained at work.
"We look upon this situation as very serious and
we are closing our office to the public," foreign ministry spokesman Rune
Bjaastad said.
He did not say when the office in Al Ram in the West
Bank would reopen. Nine Norwegian diplomats and 14 local staff work in the
office, he said.
Mohammed blasphemy row intensifies
An
international row over newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed gathered
pace on Thursday as more European dailies printed Danish caricatures of
him and Muslims stepped up pressure to stop them.
About a dozen
Palestinian gunmen surrounded European Union offices in the Gaza Strip
demanding an apology for the cartoons, one of which shows Islam's founder
wearing a bomb-shaped turban.
The owner of France Soir, a Paris
daily that reprinted them on Wednesday along with one German and two
Spanish papers, sacked its managing editor to show "a strong sign of
respect for the beliefs and intimate convictions of every
individual."
But the tabloid staunchly defended its right to print
the cartoons. Switzerland's Le Temps and La Tribune de Geneve ran some of
them on Thursday, as did Magyar Hirlap in Budapest. Some European dailies
ran cartoons making fun of the controversy.
Iraqi Islamic leaders
urged worshippers to stage demonstrations from Baghdad to the southern
city of Basra following main weekly prayer services Friday. Hundreds of
Pakistani protesters chanted "Death to France!"
Afghanistan's
president and Indonesia's Foreign Ministry condemned the cartoons, and
Iran's Foreign Ministry summoned the Austrian ambassador, whose country
holds the EU presidency, to protest the publication.
The furor cuts
to the question of which is more sacred in the Western world - freedom of
expression or respect for religious beliefs.
Danish Prime Minister
Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the issue had gone beyond a row between
Copenhagen and the Muslim world and now centred on Western free speech
versus taboos in Islam, which is now the second religion in many European
countries.
"We are talking about an issue with fundamental
significance to how democracies work," Rasmussen told the Copenhagen daily
Politiken. "One can safely say it is now an even bigger issue."
The
clash has commercial repercussions. Danish companies have reported sales
falling in the Middle East after protests against the cartoons in the Arab
world and calls for boycotts.
Reaction to the cartoons in Middle
East countries has been scathing.
"In the West, one discovers there
are different moral ceilings and all moral parameters and measures are not
equal," wrote the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat.
"If the Danish
cartoon had been about a Jewish rabbi, it would never have been
published."
Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said Riyadh
considered the cartoons an insult to Mohammed and all Muslims. "We hope
that religious centres like the Vatican will clarify their opinion in this
respect," he told the state news agency SPA.
In Beirut, the leader
of Lebanon's Shi'ite Hizbollah said the row would never had occurred if a
17-year-old death edict against British writer Salman Rushdie been carried
out.
"Had a Muslim carried out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the
apostate Salman Rushdie, then those lowlifers would not have dared
discredit the Prophet, not in Denmark, Norway or France," Hezbollah head
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Wednesday night.
Saudi Arabia, the
birthplace of Mohammad, and Syria have recalled their ambassadors to
Denmark.