COPENHAGEN, Feb 12: The 12 blasphemous cartoons published by a Danish newspaper which have caused outrage in the Muslim world are to be used as a teaching aid in schools, an educational publisher said in an interview published on Sunday.

They may also be displayed in a museum.

“What is happening at the moment has so great a significance that you cannot brush them under the carpet,” Peter Mollerup, head of the academic section of the Danish publisher Gyldendal, told the newspaper Politiken

“It is essential that future generations know about these drawings,” he said.

He said it was not Gyldendal’s intention to provoke Muslims and the cartoons would be displayed in the context of a painstaking study of the whole affair.

Sofie Lene Back of the Royal Library told Politiken that the caricatures were essential for history and “it would be bad historical practice to censure them”.

Ervin Nielse, head of the Mediemuseum (media museum) in Odense in the centre of the country said he “did not rule out” one day displaying “these drawings that sparked it all off.”

On what appeared to be a backlash against Muslim protests 20 Muslim graves in a cemetery in a village in the west of the country were desecrated late Saturday, their tombstones torn down or smashed.—AFP