Paris, France - Denmark said on Friday it could not apologise for cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammad as outrage spread across the Muslim world from the Middle East to countries in Asia.
More European newspapers published the cartoons on Friday, arguing freedom of speech was sacred, but angry Muslims staged violent protests against jokes they consider "blasphemous".
"Neither the Danish government nor the Danish nation as such can be held responsible for drawings published in a Danish newspaper," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said after meeting with Muslim envoys in Copenhagen.
"A Danish government can never apologise on behalf of a free and independent newspaper," he said. "This is basically a dispute between some Muslims and a newspaper."
Up to 300 hardline Islamic activists in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, went on a rampage in the lobby of a building housing the Danish embassy in Jakarta.
Shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest), they smashed lamps with bamboo sticks, threw chairs, lobbed rotten eggs and tomatoes and tore up a Danish flag. No one was hurt.
Tens of thousands of angry Muslims marched through Palestinian cities, burning the Danish flag and calling for vengeance Friday against European countries where caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were published.
Early Friday, Palestinian militants threw a bomb at a French cultural center in Gaza City, and many Palestinians began boycotting European goods, especially those from Denmark.
"Whoever defames our prophet should be executed," said Ismail Hassan, 37, a tailor who marched through the pouring rain along with hundreds of others in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
"Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up," protesters in Ramallah chanted.
In mosques throughout Palestinian cities, clerics condemned the cartoons. An imam at the Omari Mosque in Gaza City told 9,000 worshippers that those behind the drawings should have their heads cut off.
"If they want a war of religions, we are ready," Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon.
About 10,000 demonstrators, including gunmen from the Islamic militant group Hamas firing in the air, marched through Gaza City to the Palestinian legislature, where they climbed on the roof, waving green Hamas banners.
"We are ready to redeem you with our souls and our blood our beloved prophet," they chanted. "Down, Down Denmark."
Thousands of protesters in the center of Nablus burned at least 10 Danish flags. In Jenin, about 1,500 people demonstrated, burning Danish dairy products. Hundreds protested in Jericho, and protests were held in towns throughout Gaza.
Fearing an outbreak of violence, Israel barred all Palestinians under age 45 from praying at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site.
Nevertheless, about 100 men chanting Islamic slogans and carrying a green Hamas flag demonstrated outside Jerusalem's Old City on Friday afternoon. The crowd scattered when police on horseback arrived, and some of the protesters threw rocks. Police broke up a second demonstration at Damascus Gate with tear gas and stun grenades.
In Iraq, the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, decried the drawings but did not call for protests.
"We strongly denounce and condemn this horrific action," he said in a statement posted on his Web site and dated Tuesday.
Al-Sistani, who wields enormous influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, made no call for protests and suggested that militant Muslims were partly to blame for distorting Islam's image.
He referred to "misguided and oppressive" segments of the Muslim community and said their actions "projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love and brotherhood."
"Enemies have exploited this ... to spread their poison and revive their old hatreds with new methods and mechanisms," he said.
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as saying the caricatures are an attack on "our spiritual values" which have damaged efforts to establish an alliance between the Muslim world and Europe.
Hundreds of Turks emerging from mosques following Friday prayers staged demonstrations, including one in front of the Danish consulate in Istanbul.
"Hands that reach Islam must be broken," chanted a group of extremists outside the Merkez Mosque in Istanbul.
Veteran Iranian revolutionary cleric Akbar Hashemi Rasfanjani condemned the European press for printing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, but urged Muslims to respond calmly.
"There are one-and-a-half billion Muslims, all of them furious," the former two-term Iranian president said in a Friday prayer sermon.
He said European papers may have reprinted the cartoons "in the name of freedom of expression", but added that "if freedom of expression ends up with insulting the beliefs of a quarter of the world's population, all of them will react as they are doing now and the situation will get even worse.
"Today they are drawing pictures of the prophet with a bomb as a turban to say that Muslims are terrorists. We need to put forward our calm and compassionate side, our gentleness. It is enough to look at the Koran," said Rafsanjani, a moderate conservative and still a powerful figure in Iran.
The sermon was followed by a large but calm march of several thousand people, many of them chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Denmark".
The drawings, first published in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten, have sparked international fury and a debate on the clash between freedom of speech and respect for religion.
Mona Omar Attia, Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, said after a meeting with Rasmussen that she was satisfied with the position of the Danish government but noted the prime minister had said he could not interfere with the press.
"This means the whole story will continue and that we are back to square one again. The government of Denmark has to do something to appease the Muslim world," Attia said.
Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yuri Thamrin said the dispute was not just between Jakarta and Copenhagen.
"It involves the whole Islamic world vis-a-vis Denmark and vis-a-vis the trend of Islamophobia," he said.
Pakistan's parliament on Friday passed a resolution condemning the cartoons as "blasphemous and derogatory".
Some Muslims consider any images of Mohammad to be blasphemous. Among the Danish drawings, one depicted him in a turban resembling a bomb.
"This vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign cannot be justified in the name of freedom of expression or of the press," the Senate resolution said.
Danish companies have reported sales falling in the Middle East after protests in the Arab world and calls for boycotts.
Palestinian gunmen seized and later released a German on Thursday, and a hand grenade was thrown into the compound of the French Cultural Centre in the Gaza Strip.
"UNACCEPTABLE" PROTESTS
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned the protests in a television interview.
"I am totally shocked and find it unacceptable that -- because there have been caricatures in the West -- extremists can burn flags or take fundamentalist or extremist positions which would prove the cartoonists right," he said.
Rasmussen said he hoped the situation would improve soon.
"If the protests escalate further, it may have unpredictable repercussions in all the countries affected and then the problem could grow into a more global one, and I think it's in our mutual interest to find a solution to that," he said.
The editor of a Norwegian magazine which reprinted the Danish cartoons said he had received 25 death threats and thousands of hate messages.
Iraqi Christians said they feared a new wave of attacks by Muslims, driven by anger over the images.
MEDIA FREEDOM
European newspapers said publishing the cartoons was an expression of media freedom.
"Liberation defends the freedom of expression," French daily Liberation said in a headline introducing two of the cartoons, one of which depicted an imam telling suicide bombers to stop because Heaven had run out of virgins with which to reward them.
Belgian newspaper De Standaard reproduced the pictures along with letters from readers in favour of publication.
"Two values are in conflict here. One is respect for religion and the other is freedom of speech," Editor-in-Chief Peter Vandermeersch told Reuters.
British newspapers have so far refused to publish the cartoons, earning them praise from Foreign Minister Jack Straw.
"I believe the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," he said.
"I place on record my regard for the British media, which has shown considerable responsibility and sensitivity."
In Washington, the State Department criticized the drawings, calling them "offensive to the beliefs of Muslims."
While recognizing the importance of freedom of the press and expression, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus said these rights must be coupled with press responsibility.
"Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable," Hironimus said. "We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices."
More protests were expected in the Muslim world. In Iran, worshippers were expected to take part in a nationwide rally after Friday prayers to protest.