Last Friday, Danish newspaper Politiken made a big show of apologizing for reprinting the Muhmmad cartoons and thereby offending Muslims. Politiken, btw, claim this will not prevent them from reprinting the cartoons.
The move caused a political storm. Denmark's new foreign minister, Lene Espersen, and PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen both voiced concern about the move.
In response to the apology, the Danish People's Party (DPP) posted the cartoon on their website.
Danish blogger Uriasposten posted a screen-capture of how Danish broadcaster DR reported about the DPP move:
The question being, what's worse? Politiken apologizing while reserving the right to reprint the cartoons in the future, or DR not apologizing for anything while practicing self-censorship?
It's not only DR, of course. Not one Danish newspapers who reported about this dared post the offending graphic. Jyllands-Posten was critical of Politiken for apologizing (though they apologized too.. ), but they don't dare post the Mohammad cartoon in order to illustrate their own story about it.
After the most recent attack on Mohammad cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Danish newspapers decided not to reprint the cartoon in the context of reporting about the attack. 84% of Danes agreed with that decision.
DR meanwhile reports that the apology didn't make much of an impression on the organizations involved:
Politiken's chief editor, Tøger Seidenfaden, could only name one of the eight Muslim organizations he had apologized to, and that organization wrote nothing about it on its site, reports B.T.
The organization of Muhammad's descendants in Egypt, Niqabat al-Ashrafs, one of the largest of the oranziations, completely ingored Politiken's apology for insulting the prophet by reprinting the Muhammad cartoons.
On Friday the newspaper made the headlines when chief editor Tøger Seidenfaden sent out a press releaes in both Danish and English.
Ali Maktabi, municipal counciloor in Frederiksberg, looked up the Arab site for B.T. and though it was updated Sunday, the settlement wasn't mentioned at all.
Arabic language TV station al-Jazeera was quick to report on the apology, without mentioning that Politiken claimed the right to print the famous cartoon again.
B.T. wanted to check the sites of the other seven organizaiton for the descritpion of hte settlement, but Tøger Seidenfaden couldn't say what they were called. Still, on TV2 News he said the eight organizaitons were very respected.
Source: DR (Danish)
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