Hizbut Tahrir protests blasphemy against Prophet Muhammad in Europe

Bandung, West Java (ANTARA News) - Around 300 members of Hizbut Tahrir staged a rally here on Thursday to protest European media behavior blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad. The publication of cartoons on the Prophet Muhammad in European newspapers could not be separated from the `war on terror` being waged by the US, Europe and their allies, the Muslim organization said in a statement.The rally was a reaction to the publication of cartoons blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark, and other media in Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain as well as several other European countries."The publication of the cartoons is a deliberate act, and therefore we demand the death sentence for the perpetrators," the rally`s coordinator, Lutfi Afandi, said.Publication of the blasphemous cartoons in European countries represented a destructive human rights doctrine, he said."We strongly condemn the blasphemy," he said.Hizbut Tahrir urged the Indonesian government to take a stern stance on the blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad happening repeatedly in Europe. Seventeen Danish newspapers reprinted on February 13 a drawing of a man described as the Prophet Muhammad with a ticking bomb in his turban. Meanwhile, IINA (International Islamic News Agency) reported from Doha that renowned Islamic scholar Yusuf Qaradhawi has called on Muslims worldwide to react calmly and rationally to the reprinting of a Danish cartoon ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad ."This is an insult to Muslims and an attempt to provoke them," Qaradhawi, president of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, told Al Jazeera news channel. He also renewed the call to boycott Danish products as a demonstration of anger at the reprinting of the lampooning cartoon. The Egyptian government has summoned the ambassador of Denmark in Cairo to protest the reprinting of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers.Under a decree issued by Egyptian Information Minister Anas Al Fiqi, Germany`s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt, Britain`s Observer and the US Wall Street Journal will not be sold, the MENA news agency said. In Yemen, economic sources expected that Danish products exported to Yemen would incur unexpected losses of over one billion riyals in the coming days. Yemeni people have begun a boycott campaign against Danish goods.