Muslim clerics demand Danish apology to end boycott

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Only an official apology by the Danish government to all Muslims for offence caused by the Prophet Mohammad cartoons will prompt the lifting of the boycott of Danish goods, Muslim preachers said on Friday.

An official apology "is absolutely necessary ... because your government has not dealt with them (Muslims) respectfully," Islamic scholar Tareq al-Suweidan told a conference hosted by the government in an attempt to ease tension over the drawings.

The cartoons, first printed by a Danish paper last year and later reprinted elsewhere, provoked a storm of protests among Muslims, attacks on three Danish embassies and a boycott of Danish goods in some countries which has hit dairy exports.

If there is no apology, "The scholars of Islam and myself ... I am running an Islamic satellite TV channel, we will encourage people to continue the boycott," Suweidan said.

Amr Khaled, a preacher whose Cairo-based television shows are widely watched, said an apology alone was not enough. "Dialogue and many practical common projects are more important. We came here to build bridges but it must be two-way bridges," he told the gathering.

Suweidan said his argument was not with the Danish cartoonists, who are under police protection after being threatened, but with their government.

"We are not angry because some of your cartoonists have drawn our beloved prophet. We are aggravated because of the way your government has mishandled this situation," he said The centre-right Danish government has refused to apologize on behalf of the newspaper saying it cannot influence the free press, but it acknowledged that many Muslims had felt gravely insulted by the controversial drawings.

Suweidan, a Kuwaiti, said the Norwegian government had apologized after a Norwegian newspaper printed the cartoons in January. "If they (the Danish government) had just done that, the problem would not have arrived," he said.

In Norway the editor of the paper Magazinet apologized to Muslims for hurting them by printing the cartoons, while the government defended free speech but regretted the insult.

Both Muslim clerics supported free speech but accused the western world of applying double standards.

"We want the laws in Denmark and the European Union to be changed, either to have free speech for everyone including on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, or to change the law to respect religious figures like Mohammad," Suweidan said.

March 10,2006