Religious caricature in legal tug of war

The Arab European League (AEL, a Belgian-Dutch movement classified as anti-Semitic by the Belgian government) has struck up a tug o’ war match with the Dutch courts by refusing to comply with the public prosecutor’s demand of 18 August that it pull a negationist caricature off its web site, reportsDe Volkskrant. According to the Dutch daily, the prosecutor finds that the cartoon, which portrays two Jews staging the Holocaust, constitutes an "insult to all Jews as it suggests the murder of six million of them was a fabrication”. Abdou Bouzerda, AEL spokesman and author of the cartoon, says the prosecutor’s office is applying a “double standard”: on 18 August the latter also announced it was not going to prosecute websites that had published the Danish caricatures of Muhammad in 2006 – on the grounds that those caricatures concern the Prophet, not Muslims as a group, in contrast to the AEL cartoon.