BAGHDAD: Iraq’s small Christian community braced for further attacks, fearful that deadly bombings of their churches last month were linked to growing Muslim fury over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) published in Europe.

“The church blasts were a reaction to the cartoons,” said Louis Sako, the Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk. “But Christians are not responsible for what is published in Europe,” he said in the ethnically mixed city.

“Innocent people were killed because of these cartoons... this is terror,” he said, referring to car bombings at several churches last month that killed three people and wounded 17.

Caricatures in European newspapers have enraged Muslims worldwide, including Iraq, home to militant groups who say they are waging holy war against domination by Western infidels.

In the southern Iraq city of Basra, angry crowds burnt a Danish flag in protest against the country where the cartoons were first published last year.

Sako and ordinary Iraqi Christians provide no proof that the church blasts were connected to the cartoons, but their suspicions are enough to put the minority community on edge.

Christians have inhabited the region that is now Iraq for about 2,000 years but started leaving the country in droves after attacks on churches began in 2004.

Tracing their ancestry to ancient Mesopotamia, Christians are deeply attached to the country but worry that the rage over the cartoons will only bring them more violence.

Newspapers in France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Hungary, expressing support for freedom of the press, have reprinted the Danish caricatures, or photos of publications that printed them. One original cartoon was of Mohammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.

Most Muslims consider any images of Mohammad to be blasphemous. Christians used to make up 3 per cent of Iraq’s population, numbering about 1 million. But that figure has fallen to below 800,000.

· French and German titles risk Muslim world's wrath
· Editors defend right to freedom of expression

Guardian

France Soir and Germany's Die Welt published cartoons which first appeared in a Danish newspaper, although the French paper later apologised and apparently sacked its managing editor. The cartoons include one showing a bearded Muhammad with a bomb fizzing out of his turban.

The caricatures, printed last September in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper and reprinted by a Norwegian magazine, have provoked uproar across the Middle East. Italy's La Stampa printed a smaller version on an inside page yesterday, while two Spanish papers, Barcelona's El Periódico and Madrid's El Mundo, carried images of the cartoon as it appeared in the Danish press. The pictures also appeared in Dutch and Swiss newspapers.

There have been protests in several countries yesterday, as well as a boycott of Danish goods. Saudi Arabia has withdrawn its ambassador to Copenhagen, Syria recalled its chief diplomat, while Libya has closed its embassy. On Monday, gunmen from al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade briefly occupied the EU's office in the Gaza Strip, demanding that Denmark and Norway apologise. There was a bomb hoax at the Danish embassy in the Syrian capital, Damascus, yesterday.

The front page of the daily France Soir carried the defiant headline: "Yes, we have the right to caricature God," and a cartoon of Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim and Christian gods floating on a cloud. Inside, the paper ran the drawings.

But last night it was reported that the paper's managing editor had been sacked and an apology issued. According to Agence France Presse, France Soir's owner, Raymond Lakah, said that he removed Jacques Lefranc "as a powerful sign of respect for the intimate beliefs and convictions of every individual".

The paper's initial decision drew condemnation from the French foreign ministry, which acknowledged the importance of freedom of expression but said France condemned "all that hurts individuals in their beliefs or their religious convictions". The rare governmental rebuke revealed domestic sensitivity; France is home to western Europe's largest Muslim community with an estimated 5 million people. Germany has about 3 million.

The centre-right Die Welt also ran the caricature on the front page, reporting that Muslim groups had forced the Danish newspaper to issue an apology. It described the protests as hypocritical, pointing out Syrian TV had depicted Jewish rabbis as cannibals. Yesterday Roger Köppel, editor-in-chief of Die Welt, said he had no regrets. He told the Guardian: "It's at the very core of our culture that the most sacred things can be subjected to criticism, laughter and satire. If we stop using our journalistic right of freedom of expression within legal boundaries then we start to have a kind of appeasement mentality. This is a remarkable issue. It's very important we did it. Without this there would be no Life of Brian."

Muslim groups in both countries were furious. "It's odious and we totally disapprove of it," said Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Muslim Council. "It's a real provocation towards the millions of Muslims in France." The council planned legal action against France Soir, he said, and he intended to complain to Denmark's ambassador.

The "blasphemous" cartoons were reminiscent of the caricatures of Jews published by the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer, Michael Muhammad Pfaff, of the German Muslim League, told the Guardian."Press freedom shouldn't be used to insult people. We Germans need to know our history."

Denmark 's prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, on Monday begged Arab countries not to boycott Danish products. Lego and Bang & Olufsen have been boycotted, and a Danish milk firm in Riyadh has had to close. The Arab League condemned the cartoons, demanding those responsible "be punished".

On the net, Iraqi groups threatened attacks against the 500 Danish soldiers in southern Iraq. Muslim hackers have tried to shut the Danish newspaper's website and a hoax bomb threat yesterday forced its building to be evacuated.

Extract from yesterday's France Soir

It is necessary to crush once again the infamous thing, as Voltaire liked to say. This religious intolerance that accepts no mockery, no satire, no ridicule. We citizens of secular and democratic societies are summoned to condemn a dozen caricatures judged offensive to Islam. Summoned by who? By the Muslim Brotherhood, by Syria, the Islamic Jihad, the interior ministers of Arab countries, the Islamic Conferences - all paragons of tolerance, humanism and democracy.

So, we must apologise to them because the freedom of expression they refuse, day after day, to each of their citizens, faithful or militant, is exercised in a society that is not subject to their iron rule. It's the world upside down. No, we will never apologise for being free to speak, to think and to believe.

Because these self-proclaimed doctors of law have made this a point of principle, we have to be firm. They can claim whatever they like but we have the right to caricature Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, Yahve and all forms of theism. It's called freedom of expression in a secular country ...

Protesters held placards bearing slogans including "behead the one who insults the prophet" and "free speech go to hell".

Demonstrators met outside the Regent's Park mosque, in central London, after Friday prayers before marching to the embassy on Sloane Street, west London.

One, 26-year-old Bushra Varakat, said Muslims would not accept being the target of "ridicule." "We don't know why these silly people use these cartoons unless they were showing how much they hate us," Ms Varakat, a student, said.

Shortly before the protest began, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, attacked the media outlets that had republished the images.

"There is freedom of speech - we all respect that - but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory," he told reporters.

Mr Straw praised the British media's "sensitivity" over the issue after UK newspapers declined to print the cartoons, which first appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily in September.

UK broadcasters, including the BBC and Channel 4, have shown brief glimpses of the images. The Spectator magazine briefly published them on its website, but they were removed last night.

Two rightwing newspapers in Italy, Libero and La Padania, ran the cartoons today and criticised the European media for "giving in" to pressure. "It is not a challenge, a provocation, but the defence of freedom," a front page editorial in La Padania said.

Newspapers in Germany, Belgium and Bulgaria have also printed the drawings, while the director of the French daily France Soir was fired by the paper's owner yesterday after it ran the images. "Of course, no one disputes the freedom of speech in Europe," Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said.

"Newspapers and broadcasters have the right to publish these offensive cartoons. The question is clearly whether they are exercising good judgment if they do so."

The cartoons have caused fury among Muslims, who consider any images of Muhammad to be blasphemous. Their religious tradition bars any depiction of the prophet to prevent idolatry.

Some of the cartoons depict the prophet pejoratively, with one showing him declaring that paradise had run out of virgins for suicide bombers and another depicting him with a turban shaped like a bomb.

Violent demonstrations were continuing around the world today. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, protesters broke into the lobby of the building housing the Danish embassy, pelting part of it with eggs.

In an overnight incident, Palestinian militants threw a pipe bomb at the French cultural centre in Gaza City and gunmen opened fire on the building. Yesterday, a grenade was thrown into the building. No one was hurt in the attacks.

There were expected to be more protests in the Palestinian territories later today.

Armed factions last night threatened to kidnap Europeans unless their governments apologised for publishing the cartoons. A German teacher was briefly kidnapped by gunmen in Nablus, while gunmen in Gaza stormed the EU building.

Islamic groups called for protests to be held in Iraq and Egypt as Muslims went to Friday prayers.

Elsewhere, several politicians in Pakistan's parliament criticised the series of 12 cartoons.

The Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, yesterday told the al-Arabiya television channel that Danish people "deeply respect all people, including Islam", and that no offence had been intended.

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said freedom of the press should not be an excuse for insulting religions, while the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, said newspapers had been deliberately provocative.

When one person's liberty collides with another's values, there is no clear occupant of the moral high ground

The first thing to say about the contested cartoons published by a Danish paper last September is that some are, indeed, offensive. Jyllands-Posten took up the case of a Danish author who could find no one to illustrate a book about the prophet Muhammad. The paper, presenting this as a case of self-censorship, asked 12 illustrators for depictions of the prophet, and the one that has caused immense offence shows the prophet wearing a turban that conceals a fizzing bomb.

The cartoonist can't be accused of ignorance or lack of research - he has scrupulously transcribed a verse from the Qur'an on the turban - and there's no doubt that this is seriously offensive, and not just to Muslims but anyone who values truthful debate. It just isn't true to say that, from its founding, Islam would inevitably lead to suicide bombing, or even that its founder's teachings bear responsibility for this particular brand of atrocity.

That accusation, if made of any religion or secular school of thought that has spawned violent followers - a comparable image of Marx, say, or, quite plausibly, Darwin - would in most cases be just as offensive and wrong. In this case there is a special, deliberate offence to Muslims because the religion has an edict against such depictions.

Whether action should be taken, in a western democracy, against an argument that is just wrong, or against deliberate offence caused, however great, is another question. It's difficult to see that personal offence should be the basis of legal action in a state professing commitment to freedom of speech. The state takes a view on when personal offence is reasonable and when it threatens to infringe someone else's liberty, largely based on whether offence is caused generally, or just to a section of the community. Do the Danish cartoons cause offence only to isolated individuals? Or do they so attack anyone professing to be a Muslim that they would be caught by the UK's religious hatred law?

The cartoons almost certainly look very different to a Muslim living in a western democracy and to someone in the Muslim world. It's easy to sympathise with a Muslim living in Denmark, who would feel directly persecuted by these images. The Copenhagen Muslim interviewed in yesterday's Guardian certainly had a point when he compared them to the comments of a Danish MP who apparently called Muslims "a cancer in Denmark". Many people in his situation live difficult lives, and such images won't improve matters much.

But along with the sympathy one has to feel for people in that beleaguered situation, the uses that the Danish cartoons have been put to in the Muslim world must be challenged. Around the world, the anti-Danish campaign is being used by Islamist political groups to rally support for extreme causes. The aim of many such groups is, through pressure, to limit free speech on religious matters in the west, and entirely suppress it at home.

It is often forgotten to what degree law-making in the west is still seen across the globe as a model of good practice; and for that single reason our freedom of speech, even if exercised for the purposes of causing offence, even if simply wrong in practice, can't be eroded. To take an example: in Bangladesh in 1994, an attempt was made to introduce a law limiting what could be said on religious subjects. It failed because, it was argued, its terms could not be paralleled in the laws of any democracy. Britain's new law on religious hatred, even in its limited form, removes that defence from liberal voices outside Europe.

Debate on a great many subjects is already severely limited in the Muslim world. Reading Robert Irwin's brilliant new book, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, it is a shock to learn that serious scholarly work by historians on the first years of Islam has to be expressed in code, lest it cause offence to the faithful by contradicting the received account. It is unlikely that a newspaper in a Muslim country will ever want to commission a cartoon along the Danish lines. But we are really talking about groups, even in relatively liberal Muslim countries, that want to draw the lines of permitted debate much tighter than they are at present.

In practice, our freedom of speech is not seriously threatened. Cartoonists will probably be careful about exercising good taste in such an area, as they already do on parallel subjects - for instance, in drawing an Israeli or Jewish politician, a cartoonist will probably avoid the hateful conventions of anti-semitic caricature. After the boycotts and a few noble-sounding words, we will probably go on much as before.

And that's probably the best thing to do. If anti-democratic forces in the Muslim world can make such effective use of a cartoon in a small European country, they would be much more encouraged by any signs of restriction on our part. Anyone in the Muslim world arguing for freedom of speech, on religious or other matters, has only one place to look to - the west. We ought to take into account the sorts of factions in the Muslim world who would regard legal restrictions on our side as part of a wider victory.

· Philip Hensher is the author of The Mulberry Empire comment@guardian.co.uk

Gary Younge: No

In January 2002 the New Statesman published a front page displaying a shimmering golden Star of David impaling a union flag, with the words "A kosher conspiracy?" The cover was widely and rightly condemned as anti-semitic. It's not difficult to see why. It played into vile stereotypes of money-grabbing Jewish cabals out to undermine the country they live in. Some put it down to a lapse of editorial judgment. But many saw it not as an aberration but part of a trend - one more broadside in an attack on Jews from the liberal left.

A group calling itself Action Against Anti-Semitism marched into the Statesman's offices, demanding a printed apology. One eventually followed. The then editor, Peter Wilby, later confessed that he had not appreciated "the historic sensitivities" of Britain's Jews. I do not remember talk of a clash of civilisations in which Jewish values were inconsistent with the western traditions of freedom of speech or democracy. Nor do I recall editors across Europe rushing to reprint the cover in solidarity.

Quite why the Muslim response to 12 cartoons printed by Jyllands-Posten last September should be treated differently is illuminating. There seems to be almost universal agreement that these cartoons are offensive. There should also be universal agreement that the paper has a right to publish them. When it comes to freedom of speech the liberal left should not sacrifice its values one inch to those who seek censorship on religious grounds, whether US evangelists, Irish Catholics or Danish Muslims.

But the right to freedom of speech equates to neither an obligation to offend nor a duty to be insensitive. There is no contradiction between supporting someone's right to do something and condemning them for doing it. If our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in anti-racism should be no less so. These cartoons spoke not to historic sensitivities, but modern ones. Muslims in Europe are now subjected to routine discrimination on suspicion that they are terrorists, and Denmark has some of Europe's most draconian immigration policies. These cartoons served only to compound such prejudice.

The right to offend must come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent responsibility. If newspapers have the right to offend then surely their targets have the right to be offended. Moreover, if you are bold enough to knowingly offend a community then you should be bold enough to withstand the consequences, so long as that community expresses displeasure within the law.

So far this has been the case. Despite isolated acts of violence that should be condemned, the overwhelming majority of the protests have been peaceful. Several Arab and Muslim nations have withdrawn their ambassadors from Denmark. There have been demonstrations outside embassies. Meanwhile, according to Denmark's consul in Dubai, a boycott of Danish products in the Gulf has cost the country $27m.

The Jyllands-Posten editor took four months to apologise. That was his decision. If he was not truly sorry then he shouldn't have done so; if he was then he should have done so sooner. Given that it took yet one more month for the situation to deteriorate to this level, these recent demonstrations can hardly be described as kneejerk.

"This is a far bigger story than just the question of 12 cartoons in a small Danish newspaper," Flemming Rose, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, told the New York Times. Too right, but it is not the story Rose thinks it is. Rose says: "This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society - how much does an immigrant have to give up and how much does the receiving culture have to compromise."

Rose displays his ignorance of both modern secular society and the role of religion in it. Freedom of the press has never been sacrosanct in the west. Last year Ireland banned the film Boy Eats Girl because of graphic suicide scenes; Madonna's book Sex was unbanned there only in 2004. American schoolboards routinely ban the works of Alice Walker, JK Rowling and JD Salinger. Such measures should be opposed, but not in a manner that condemns all Catholics or Protestants for being inherently intolerant or incapable of understanding satire.

Even as this debate rages, David Irving sits in jail in Austria charged with Holocaust denial for a speech he made 17 years ago; the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza is on trial in London for inciting racial hatred; and a retrial has been ordered for the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, on the same charges. The question has never been whether you draw a line under what is and what is not acceptable, but where you draw it. Rose and others clearly believe Muslims, by virtue of their religion, exist on the wrong side of the line.

As a result they are vilified twice: once through the cartoon, and again for exercising their democratic right to protest. The inflammatory response to their protest reminds me of the quote from Steve Biko, the South African black nationalist: "Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked."