Archive for February 5th, 2008

MoToons: How Al-Jazeera got it so wrong!

Incredible but True Department – this comes from the editor of Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, on his Northern Light blog. Jyllands-Posten, you’ll remember, was the Danish paper behind the MoToons row, which has been rehearsed so many times on this blog and others that the issue needs hardly any introduction.

But the latest twist is that Iceland – not Denmark, but Iceland, and not the frozen-food supermarket group, either – has been asked to apologise.

Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV station, made the request in an interview – even though Iceland has had nothing to do with Denmark since 1944.

The request came during an official visit by Iceland’s president, �lafur Ragnar Gr�msson, to Qatar. Gr�msson later told Radio Iceland that the Al-Jazeera interviewer “tried to put pressure on me regarding two things”. He goes on:

He asked if I would apologise for the behaviour of the Danes, and if I would ask forgiveness for what they did, this insult, this provocation, this disgrace – he used very strong words – that the Danes had demonstrated with the publication of these caricatures. But of course this was not part of my responsibilities. And to tell you the truth I didn’t expect that this case was still alive and such a hot issue that the most important TV station in the Arab world found it necessary to raise it during a visit by the president of Iceland, and they wanted to discuss it in detail.

“It’s ironic”, says one commenter on Rose’s blog, “that they try to make the case that certain people are culturally insensitive, while they fire their accusations in the wrong direction.”