OSLO, Feb 21: A Norwegian Muslim has reported to the police a newspaper editor who published the blasphemous cartoons, invoking a law last used in 1933 against a poet who called Christians cannibals.
Last month a Norwegian Christian paper published the drawings, which originated in Denmark. That sparked attacks on Norwegian interests in the Middle East and Asia.
“I have been reported to the police for blasphemy. We will have to see what happens as this law has not been used since 1933,” Verbjoern Selbekk, editor of newspaper Magazinet, said in Spain.
Paragraph 142 of Norway’s criminal code states a person can be prosecuted if he or she ‘in word or action publicly insults or in a demeaning or hurtful way displays scorn for any religious belief that is permitted in the country’.
In 1933 the state failed to convict poet Arnulf Overland for comparing Christians to cannibals for their ritual of eating bread and drinking wine to symbolise Christ’s body and blood.
The 1902 law was last used successfully to fine the editor of the Free Thinker newssheet in 1912 after he wrote an article entitled “The Great Humbug - the Christians’ Christmas”.
“There are limits for what expressions are acceptable, even in a democracy. This is a case for the police, it cannot be solved by the masses,” Khalid Mohammah, the Muslim who made the charge, told Aftenposten newspaper.
The new blasphemy charge has reopened the debate on whether to delete the clause from Norway’s law books.
Siv Jensen, deputy leader of Norway’s anti-immigrant Progress Party, said the call for Magazinet editor to be tried because of the cartoons showed that the law was “absurd”.
“I think the time is right to get rid of it because it’s been dormant for a long time,” she said.
Support for Progress has surged during the cartoon row. An opinion poll on Sunday gave it 31 percent of the vote up from under 23 percent in September’s election and just behind Labour which heads a coalition government.
But the Christian People’s Party, which led a centre-right government from 2001 to 2005, wants to retain the paragraph.
“Even though it has been dormant it’s not been useless. It acts as an ethical and moral guide,” Jon Lilletun, member of parliament for the Christian People’s Party. —Reuters
