The Danish group af artists who yesterday placed an advertisement ridiculing the Iranian President will cause Muslims to hate Danes more, says the editor of Tehran Times.
"Unfortunately, this situation will produce more hatred toward Danes; even those Danes who respect other cultures."
This reaction is from the editor of the Iranian paper Tehran Times, which yesterday published a half page-sized ad that ridicules Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The President is a swine
The advertisement was placed by the Danish group of artists, Surrend, and was accepted by the conservative and state-run newspaper, because it superficially supports Iran and ridicules U.S. President George W. Bush. In actual fact, the ad calls the Iranian President a swine.
The verbatim text was,
Support his fight against Bush
We are also tired of Bush
Iran has the right to produce nuclear energy
No USA aggression against any country
Evil US military stay home
If one reads the first letter of each line vertically, they form the word S W I N E.
"This group has betrayed the Tehran Times", says editor Parviz Esmaili according to Reuters. He explains that the Danish group, which signs off as "Danes for World Peace", presented the ad as an act of solidarity with Iran and appeared to be remorseful over last year's publishing of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed in Jyllands-Posten. More than 50 people were killed during the resulting protests in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Surrend: We want to ridicule the President
According to spokesman Jan Egesborg of Surrend, it was a time-consuming process to get the ad published in Tehran Times. "We got the ad through the censorship by pretending that it was a critique of President Bush - which it is, too - but the point is to ridicule the Iranian President, who represents an extremist Islamic ideology, denies the Holocaust, and suppresses freedom movements in Iran", says Jan Egesborg.
The Danish ambassador to Iran, Søren Haslund, has seen the ad, but offered no comments on the matter for this story.
Iran has officially been owned, ladies and gentlemen.
I can't believe they're making such a big deal about that, though. Freedom of speech apparently can't be tolerated if it's being mean to the religious extremists.
