Author: AFP
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 17, 2008
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Danish_cartoonist_protests_arrest/articleshow/3049125.cms
A Dutch cartoonist and political parties across
the board hit out on Saturday following his arrest and detention for alleged
incitement to hatred in his drawings.
Prosecutors said eight cartoons by Gregorius
Nekschott considered reprehensible had been pulled from his website for "exceeding
the limits" of freedom of expression.
Following a complaint by a Muslim imam laid
in 2005, Nekschott was arrested and his house searched on Tuesday by police
in Amsterdam. He was released on Friday.
Nekschott, whose caricatures single out Islam
and the Dutch political establishment, said in an interview published on Saturday
that in the Netherlands there was a tendency to muzzle artists.
"In Denmark they protect cartoonists,
in the Netherlands police arrest them," he told the left-wing daily De
Volksrant , referring to caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in Danish newspapers,
which caused a furore across the Muslim world.
The public television station NOS said that
political parties from extreme-right to extreme-left, including the Labour
party, a member of the centre-left coalition government, had criticised Nekschot's
arrest.
Islam and how to integrate minority communities
have become contentious issues in the Netherlands in recent years, particularly
after film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a radical Muslim in 2004 for
making a film critical of Islam's treatment of women.
Far-right lawmaker Geert Wilders fanned the
flames of controversy again this year by making his own film, Fitna , which
features violent imagery of terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid intertwined
with Koranic texts, and sparked outrage in Muslim countries.
The reaction to Wilders' film was still less
than the violent protests which followed the printing of the Danish cartoons
in September 2005.
At least 17 Danish dailies reprinted one of
the cartoons in February, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after
police in Denmark foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.