Here we go… Thousands of protesters turned out in Oslo to protest a cartoon published in a local newspaper that showed Mohammad as a pig.
FOX News reported:
About 2,500 people marched through downtown Oslo in a protest Friday against a Norwegian newspaper that printed a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.
The demonstrators chanted “God is great” in Arabic and waved placards calling for a boycott of the Dagbladet daily.
On Feb. 3, the newspaper published a photograph showing a man in front of a computer screen with a depiction of Muhammad as a pig. The picture accompanied an article that said users were posting offensive material about Muslims and Jews on the Facebook page of Norway’s security police.
Dagbladet’s acting editor-in-chief, Lars Helle, told The Associated Press that he doesn’t regret printing the offending image and that he welcomed Friday’s protest.
“It was a test for Norwegian society — whether this would be a peaceful protest or not,” Helle said.
The Brussels Journal has much more on the offensive pig cartoon.
Last week-end, almost a thousand taxi drivers in the Norwegian capital Oslo and neighboring municipality Bærum went on what could be called a religious strike. Both on Friday evening and Monday morning, Muslim taxi drivers refused to drive in protest against Wednesday’s front page of the Norwegian tabloid paper Dagbladet. That day, the tabloid ran an article about some of the “dangerous” pages the website of the Norwegian security service PST links to, and illustrated that with a screen shot of a cartoon showing the prophet Muhammad as a pig trampling the Qur’an…
…The cartoon that Dagbladet used on its front page resulted in mass demonstrations, the burning of flags, and probably a suicide attack back in 1997, when a Russian immigrant in Israel, the then 28 year old Tatiana Soskin, had put it up all over Hebron. She had to appear in court, and was later sentenced to two years in prison. Lars Helle seemed not to be aware of the fact that it was the very same cartoon that he had put on his front page that caused the mass demonstrations in Hebron in 1997.
