Good article on Moroccan reaction to cartoons.

Salon.com has an article worth reading SEE IT HERE.

Here is an edited excerpt:

The Mohammed cartoons are the talk of Ifrane, a town of 10,000 one hour's drive from Fez up into the Middle Atlas Mountains. They are the talk in the marché, where Berbers and Arabs, academics and shepherds, women veiled and not, come to shop and chat; in sidewalk cafes, where TVs play soccer matches and burning embassies; in small apartments in back streets, where women stand at the stove and men mull over the many rumors; and in mosques, where Friday prayers also serve as a community gathering.

"You can insult me, my mother, my father, but not the Prophet," my friend Abdelghanni tells me, going on to explain the heart of the matter. He's 45, an Arabic teacher in an English-language high school. "If you draw a picture of the Prophet, you will make a mistake. It will be false. We already have his description from the Koran: his eyes, his nose, his face, his hair, and so we don't draw him because we don't need to and because we don't want" -- he searches for the word -- to pollute our image."

Ali Bouzerda, a spokesperson for the government station TVM, puts the cartoon controversy this way: "The government is saying we cannot accept this, and we want to send a signal to the Western media that freedom of the press is OK, and we understand that the Danish government can't dictate to newspapers, but people in authority need to consider the effects of irresponsibility and hatred.
"At the heart of this discussion is the feeling that America is trying to divide the world into two parts, Christian and Islamic, and now mythologies are being spread, so that everything that is part of Islam is bad, and every Muslim is a terrorist. This is the West's caricature of the Middle East."


Tags: Morocco, Fes, Maghreb, news