The Hague, August 20: Cartoons lampooning Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) are not offensive and publishing them is not punishable by law, but cartoons denying Holocaust are, Dutch prosecutors have declared.
“The cartoons are about the Prophet Mohamed, but don’t say anything about Muslims,” the Public Prosecution Office (OM) said in a statement cited by Agence France Presse.
The OM received several complaints from Muslims against anti-Islam far-right MP Geert Wilders and a local TV channel over the reproduction of the anti-Prophet Danish cartoons.
The 12 cartoons were commissioned and published by the Jyllands-Posten daily in 2005.
They include drawings of a man described as Prophet Muhammad, including one wearing a bomb-shaped turban and another showing him as a knife-wielding nomad flanked by shrouded women.
The prosecutors received many complaints after Wilders, notorious for his rants against Islam and Muslims, put the cartoons on his website and Nova channel showed them.
But the OM concluded that neither Wilders nor the TV channel should be prosecuted.
It insisted that the drawings, considered blasphemous under Islam, are not illegal and do they incite discrimination against Muslims.
Not Holocaust
In a separate case, the OM found that Holocaust-denying cartoons are offensive and punishable by law.
“(The cartoons) insult Jews because of their race and/or religion,” the prosecutors said.
The OM had received complaints about two cartoons published on the website of the Arab-European League (AEL), including one said to show Jews denying the Holocaust.
The prosecutors said the cartoons are offensive because they imply that Jews themselves invented or exaggerated the Holocaust.
They threatened to punish the AEL unless it removed the cartoons.
“If it complies, charges will be provisionally dropped.”
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Holocaust refers to “systematic state-sponsored killing of Jewish men, women, and children and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.”
The commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is six million.
But the figure has been questioned by many European historians and intellectuals, chiefly French author Roger Garaudy.
-Agencies