Mr Rahimi did not disclose how Iran intended to carry out its threat and his
government did not go so far as to repeat the fatwa issued by Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini against Sir Salman Rushdie in 1989 for his depiction of
Mohammed in “The Satanic Verses”.
Islamist leaders have appeared determined to draw a link between the two
cases. A day after a senior Iranian cleric raised the bounty on the author’s
head, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah, denounced the film as an
ever greater insult to Islam than “The Satanic Verses”.
Responding to his call for a demonstration of public anger in Lebanon,
thousands of followers of the Shia militant group, which is funded and armed
by Iran, massed in the slums of south Beirut.
“The whole world needs to see your anger on your faces, in your fists and your
shouts,” Sheikh Nasrallah said.
“The whole world should know that the Prophet has followers who will not be
silent in the face of humiliation.”
President Barack Obama has raised alerts at 65 US embassies and consulates in
the past week and approved the removal yesterday of 100 embassy staff
members and American citizens from Tunisia after the US embassy was attacked
last week. The US also warned against travel to Lebanon.
More than 1,000 members of the Tunisian security forces yesterday surrounded
the al-Fatah mosque, where a Salafist leader wanted by police over clashes
at the US embassy was meeting hundreds of followers. Across the region, some
demonstrations have been spontaneous, but many have been called by leaders
of religious parties seeking to advance their Islamist credentials.
Hundreds of protesters demonstrating against the film torched a press club and
a government building in the northwestern Pakistani town of Wari, setting
off clashes with police that killed one demonstrator and wounded several
others. Another was killed in Karachi. Raja Pervez Ashraf, the prime
minister, later ordered the suspension of YouTube, where what he called the
“blasphemous” video has been easily viewed.
Protests also turned violent outside the Camp Phoenix US military base in
Kabul, where about 800 protesters burned cars and threw rocks, injuring
about 20 riot policemen. Many in the crowd shouted “Death to America!”
Hundreds clashed with police outside the US embassy in Jakarta, hurling rocks
and firebombs and setting tires alight. It was the first violence seen in
the world’s most populous Muslim country in reaction to the film.
Four Americans, including Chris Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya, were last
week killed in an attack by armed militants on the US consulate in Benghazi
amid a protest against the video. At least another five people have died
subsequent protests.
First posted online in July, the film was ignored until a14-minute trailer was
translated into Arabic and then featured in a news report by a Islamist
broadcaster in Egypt.
In Europe, fringe groups who are in favour of the film are now beginning to
pose a freedom of speech dilemma for leaders, who have denounced the work as
crass and insensitive while calling for restraint from protestors.
Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, said the authorities in her country,
which has a sizeable Muslim minority, saw “good reason” for banning the
film.
“It’s not about banning the film itself but about whether the public screening
would endanger public safety,” said Mrs Merkel, after a far-Right group said
it planned to show the film publicly.
On the weekend Germany forbade Terry Jones, the American pastor who sparked
Arab outrage when he burned Korans on the ninth anniversary of the September
11 attacks, from entering the country.
Germany has already withdrawn some staff from its embassy in Khartoum, Sudan,
which was attacked on Friday along with the British embassy.
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