Still paying the price for printing those cartoons
Michelle Malkin
An editor received his punishment for "insulting Islam" in Yemen this weekend--one year in jail and a six-month newspaper shutdown (via BBC):
A court in Yemen has sentenced a newspaper editor to a year in jail for reprinting Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
The court also ordered the independent weekly newspaper which carried the cartoons to be closed for six months.
The editor, Kamal al-Aalafi, said he had reprinted the cartoons to raise awareness, not to insult Muslims. ...
My friend Andy Bostom e-mails: "Well, I guess not beheading him for 'blasphemy' is considered 'progress.'"
The avengers aren't done yet, though. One of the other editors still on trial in Yemen is a journalist I've been privileged to correspond with since February--Muhammad al-Asadi, editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer. He faced death calls despite the absurdity of the charges against him. As I noted at the time:
[Asadi's] paper published thumbnail copies of some of the cartoons in its Feb. 4 edition, but covered them with a thick black cross to show its disapproval. In two accompanying articles, the paper condemned the cartoons and provided negative reactions from Muslims worldwide. Despite the context, the Cartoon Jihadists want al-Asadi dead because the thumbnail of one of the cartoons--only 1.5cm [0.6 of an inch] by 2cm [0.8 of an inch], he notes--appeared on the front page.
The justification for wanting to execute al-Asadi? It's what the Prophet Mohammed would have wanted, they say: ...
