Cartoon Kerfuffle Spreads Down Under

The jihad against those who published the Muslim cartoons has spread to New Zealand (h/t Little Green Footballs):

New Zealand became the latest nation unwillingly drawn in at the weekend, after two newspapers ran the cartoons in a move likely to cost the country its $NZ100 million ($A92 million) sheep trade with Iran. ...

Tim Pankhurst, editor of Wellington’s Dominion Post — owned by John Fairfax, which also owns The Age — said the paper published the cartoons as an issue of solidarity and press freedom, and he was not setting out to antagonise Muslims.

The New Zealand Government condemned the newspapers, but that did not stop Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday ordering the cancellation of economic contracts with countries where the media have carried the “repulsive” cartoons.

New Zealand diplomats in Muslim countries have been warned to take precautions against possible threats to staff and property.

NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark yesterday described the cartoons’ publication as “gratuitous”.

“New Zealand press is free and politicians don’t say what the press can print and what it can’t. It is a question of judgement and I don’t think myself either the publication, nor the reaction to it, do anything to bring communities and faiths together here or around the world.”

More than 700 angry Muslims marched through Auckland yesterday, many wearing black arm bands. Pakistan Association of New Zealand president Naveed Hamid said his group had organised the march because Muslims wanted to make their hurt felt to the public. “Something the media has to understand (is that) somebody’s religion is not for insult,” he said.

No papers in Australia have run the cartoons, but that isn't stopping local Muslims from threatening violence if they do:

A senior Islamic cleric has called on Australia’s media not to publish the cartoons which have sparked riots across the Muslim world.

Sheik Fehmi El-Imam, the general secretary of the Board of Imams of Victoria, warned reprinting the cartoons here could “disturb people who can do things that we don’t want them to do”.

“In some parts of the world there is rioting against the Danish and the Dutch, we don’t want that in Australia,” the sheik said today.

“Unfortunately, New Zealand has (published the cartoons) ... I’m trying to avoid, to put far away, any possibility of disturbing the peace in Australia.”

And in what may be the most disturbing incident this weekend, a Catholic priest was shot to death in Turkey by what may have been a teenage Islamist radical:

A teenage boy shot and killed the Italian Roman Catholic priest of a church in the Black Sea port city of Trabzon on Sunday, shouting “God is great” [“Allahu akbar!” —ed.] as he escaped, according to police and witnesses.

Officers were searching for the boy aged around 14 or 15, according to a police official who declined to be identified because of rules that bar Turkish civil servants from speaking to journalists without prior authorization.

The police official would not say if the attack might be linked to the printing in European newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, which has caused anger in Muslim countries.

One misguided kid does not make a war on Christianity, but given the lack of reasoned response by Muslims so far, nothing would surprise me.