When a Danish news paper first published drawings of Prophet Muhammad in September 2005, it could have hardly known that it would stirring a hornet’s nest. Since its first publication, several other leading European newspapers had picked up the cue kindling widespread protest from the Islamic community all across the world.
And one of those protestors was a Lebanese, Jihad Hamad. He couldn’t contain himself to the common acts of burning Western leaders’ effigies and staging demonstrations in front of foreign embassies; he did something rather drastic.
His planting of two gas canisters filled with detonators on two trains in Cologne on July 31, 2006 was hailed as an al-Qaeda attack at the time but now the perpetrator says that it was an act of defiance against the European press’ depiction of the Prophet in a distorted form. What Hamad did was extend the Islamic world’s protests against the so-called blasphemy to active harm to the people. This cannot be justified or accepted.
The European newspapers did something deplorable indeed since they ought to have been more discreet and sympathetic towards the illustration of the Prophet in cartons and one has to say that the Muslim community all throughout the world was right in protesting against the misleading cartoons. But violence anywhere, anytime and for any reason can never be accepted. Jihad Hamad and fellow suspect Youssef el-Hajdib’s failed bomb attack on German soil has only augmented the increasing drift between Islam and the rest of the world.
Since the 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia has taken precedence and the string of attacks in the name of Islam around the world has helped sustain the ghastly phenomenon. A total of five men are suspected to be in the plot and four of them, including Hamad, are standing trial in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. They would almost certainly be charged but the apprehensions would drag on.
Image Source: WDR
Source: Associated Press
