Muslims Picket 'Philadephia Inquirer' After It Runs Cartoon

By: E&P Staff On Saturday, the Philadelphia Inquirer became one of the first major U.S. papers to carry a drawing featuring Muhammad -- with a lit bomb stuck in his turban -- that have sparked riots abroad. On Monday, more than two dozen Muslims offended by that decision picketed the newspaper.

"It's disrespectful to us as a people," Asim Abdur-Rashid, an imam with the Majlis Ash'Shura, an umbrella group for mosques in the Delaware Valley, told the Inquirer for a story today. "It's disrespectful to our prophet to imply that he's a prophet of violence."

The group may call for a boycott and a further protest on Friday if the newspaper does not apologize.

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Amanda Bennett, The Inquirer's editor, and Carl Lavin, a deputy managing editor, talked with the protesters outside the building.

"Neither I nor the newspaper meant any disrespect to their religion or their prophet," Bennett said in her paper. "I told them I was actually really proud of them for exercising their right to freedom of speech."

But Bennett stood by the decision to publish the cartoon, saying it "is one of the things newspapers do to communicate directly with people" about issues important to all communities.

She told The New York Times, "There's been a whole history of newspapers publishing things that people would find controversial and offensive. My view is that we need to publish it for a good news reason, we need to publish in context and we need to explain to readers why we did it."

Few U.S. newspapers have reprinted the cartoon. The New York Times, in an editorial today, noted that it had not carried any of the cartoons and "much of the rest of the nation's news media have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them. That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words."

Some newspapers have carried links to the cartoon images on their Web sites, however.

In an e-mail to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau declared he would never use images of Muhammad.
"Nor will I be using any imagery that mocks Jesus Christ....I may not agree with their reasons for dropping any particular strip, in fact, I usually don't, but I will defend their right and responsibility to delete material that they feel is inappropriate for their readership," he said.

"It's not censorship, it's editing. Just because a society has almost unlimited freedom of expression doesn't mean we should ever stop thinking about its consequences in the real world."

Poynter Institute faculty discussed the journalistic issues relating to the controversy in a roundtable (read the transcript or download the 21-minute podcast).