Someone’s Telling Porky Pies

The Egyptian Foreign Minister has claimed that he spoke repeatedly with his Danish counterpart, advising him on how to avert the “cartoon crisis” – advice he says went unheeded.

 

The Danish Foreign Minister has replied with: Liar liar, pants embassy on fire.

The Danish government ignored several offers from Egypt to help it avoid a full-blown crisis over cartoons of Prophet Mohammed first published in Denmark, media in Copenhagen quoted Egypt’s foreign minister as saying on Thursday.

 

“I said that we were approaching something that was very dangerous. The contents of this case risked causing serious consequences,” Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Abul Gheit told the Politiken daily, describing discussions with Danish authorities in the months before the row over the Mohammed drawings escalated into violent protests in many Muslim countries.

 

The row, he had warned his Danish counterpart Per Stig Moeller, “could cause problems for your country with the rest of the Arab-Muslim world. I warn you, we must find a solution before these problems arise.”

 

Despite several phone calls with Moeller, Gheit said that his warnings were not heeded.

 

“The [Danish] foreign minister’s message was ‘no, no and no. If this is a case for you, you should pursue it in court’,” Gheit said.

 

Moeller denied, however, on Thursday having had any phone conversations with Gheit on the issue.

 

“It is not true that the Egyptian foreign minister called me several times on the phone. He never called me once,” he told reporters.

 

The 12 drawings of Mohammed, which first appeared in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten last September, have over the past month sparked violent protests in Muslim countries against Denmark especially, as well as against other European countries where the cartoons have since been reprinted.

 

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has refused to apologize for the publication of the cartoons, insisting that his government has no sway over what appears in the media in Denmark, where freedom of expression is fundamental.

 

In the Politiken interview, however, Gheit claimed that Egypt had stated in letters and phone calls to Danish authorities and international bodies last year that an official stand against offending religious beliefs would be enough to defuse Muslim tensions, and that Copenhagen would not have had to compromise on its support for freedom of expression.

 

“I did not want the Danish prime minister to stop Jyllands-Posten … All I wanted was a stand [on the issue]. I wanted to know if an offense had been committed or not and if this was acceptable,” he said.

 

In a letter addressed to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, dated November 23, 2005, Gheit even insisted that “We do not expect any country to take punitive or disciplinary action against a newspaper.”

 

He went on, however, to say that “we had expected an official Danish statement that would emphasize the necessity and indeed the obligation for respecting all religions and refraining from offending their followers with a view to avoiding escalation [of the conflict] that could entail serious ramifications.”

2 thoughts on “Someone’s Telling Porky Pies”

  1. The role of the Egyptian minister of foreign affairs is indeed interesting.

    I posted my take on it some days ago: Egyptian double-dealing and Egyptian double-dealings, Part II

    Politiken used to be a respectable paper and I have subscribed to the Sunday edition for 20 years or so. Recently however, they have gone totally overboard and have launched a vendetta against the government. I no longer consider them trustworthy and have canceled my subscription.

    Our Foreign Minister, Per Stig M¯ller, is respected in academic circles and has written several learned tomes about history and literature. Unfortunately, in the real world he is not very good when it comes to political play. If he and Mr. Gheit says the opposite of each other, I’m very much inclined to believe Mr. M¯ller. But it will be interesting to follow.

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