The top editor of the Danish newspaper whose caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad sparked rage throughout the Islamic world said Wednesday the daily would not reprint Holocaust cartoons being solicited by an Iranian newspaper.
Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper.
Photo: AP
Editor-in-Chief Carsten Juste said his newspaper Jyllands-Posten "in no circumstances will publish Holocaust cartoons from an Iranian newspaper."
A prominent Iranian newspaper has said it would hold a competition for cartoons on the Holocaust to test whether the West extends the principle of freedom of expression to the Nazi genocide as it did to the Muhammad caricatures.
Earlier, culture editor Flemming Rose said of the Iranian cartoons: "We would consider publishing them, but we will not make a decision before we have seen the cartoons."
"I have committed an error," Rose said later in an interview with Danish television. "I am 100 percent with the newspaper's line and Carsten Juste in this case."
Juste, meanwhile, has rejected suggestions that he step down in the wake of the furor, which has brought sometimes-fatal protest outbursts and the burning of two Danish embassies in the Middle East.
The Danish paper has come under mounting pressure, at home and abroad, after publishing the drawings in September. Former Foreign Minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen said Wednesday on national radio that "when an editor in chief admits he made an erroneous judgment ... he should quit."
In a brief reply on the daily's Web site, Juste said, "I do not feel called ... in that direction."
The drawings - including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb - have touched a nerve in part because Islam is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry.
