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View Full Version : Cartoon Controversy 2.0



Mr Endon
08-20-2009, 01:10 PM
I hope we can keep this as apolitical as is possible.

News from the Netherlands (in www.presseeurop.eu)


Netherlands | Religious caricature in legal tug of war

The Arab European League (AEL, a Belgian-Dutch movement classified as anti-Semitic by the Belgian government) has struck up a tug o’ war match with the Dutch courts by refusing to comply with the public prosecutor’s demand of 18 August that it pull a negationist caricature off its web site, reports De Volkskrant. According to the Dutch daily, the prosecutor finds that the cartoon, which portrays two Jews staging the Holocaust, constitutes an "insult to all Jews as it suggests the murder of six million of them was a fabrication”. Abdou Bouzerda, AEL spokesman and author of the cartoon, says the prosecutor’s office is applying a “double standard”: on 18 August the latter also announced it was not going to prosecute websites that had published the Danish caricatures of Muhammad in 2006 – on the grounds that those caricatures concern the Prophet, not Muslims as a group, in contrast to the AEL cartoon.

...well, how would you have ruled? It's your opinion that interests me, but any lawyer/judge out there is more than welcome to bring their expertise.

Emil Miller
08-20-2009, 01:35 PM
I hope we can keep this as apolitical as is possible.

News from the Netherlands (in www.presseeurop.eu)



...well, how would you have ruled? It's your opinion that interests me, but any lawyer/judge out there is more than welcome to bring their expertise.

Personally, I wouldn't prosecute either group. I take no sides with Muslims or Jews but attempts to prevent anyone from airing their views is pointless in the age of the internet.
On a point of law, though, if it is found that anyone is in breach of exisiting laws, even unenforceable ones, they obviously lay themseves open to prosecution.