Iran threatens to cancel European contracts in cartoons row

Iran’s president ordered his commerce minister today to study cancelling all trade contracts with European countries whose newspapers have published caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The cartoons have provoked outrage in the Islamic world, partly because most Muslims believe that any depictions of the Prophet Muhammad is forbidden and partly because several drawings portray the prophet as a man of violence.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the caricatures showed the “impudence and rudeness” of Western newspapers against the prophet, as well as the “maximum resentment of the Zionists (Jews) ruling these countries against Islam and Muslims”.

Ahmadinejad is well known for attacks on Jews, having caused outcries last year when he dismissed the Nazi Holocaust as a myth and said Israel should be “wiped off” the map.

The news agency quoted the president as writing to Commerce Minister Masoud Mirkazemi: “It is necessary to set up a committee … to reconsider and cancel economic contracts with countries starting this hateful action.”

Earlier this week, Iran’s Foreign Ministry protested about the cartoons in a meeting with the Austrian ambassador, who was summoned to the ministry as a representative of the European Union.

Austria holds the rotating presidency of the EU.

The 12 cartoons, one of which shows the prophet with a turban shaped like a bomb with a burning fuse, were first published by a Danish newspaper in September. They were reprinted by newspapers across Europe this week as editors rallied in the name of freedom of expression.

Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast Asia have burned Danish flags, demonstrated outside Danish embassies and called for boycotts of Danish goods.

European leaders have pleaded for dialogue and mutual respect. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday she understood Muslims’ hurt over the cartoons but that such sentiment did not justify a violent reaction.