Denmark Urges Calm Amid Cartoon Fury

(CBS/AP)  International peacekeepers clashed Tuesday with Afghans protesting in a remote northern city against caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, leaving three demonstrators dead and forcing NATO to send in more troops.

Senior Afghan officials said al Qaeda and the Taliban could be exploiting anger over the cartoons to incite violence, which spread to at least six cities in a second day of bloody unrest in Afghanistan.

Demonstrations rumbled on around the Muslim world and the political repercussions deepened, with Iran suspending all trade and economic ties with Denmark, where the drawings were first published in September. Denmark's prime minister called the protests a global crisis and appealed for calm.

The drawings — including one depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb — have touched a raw nerve. Islam is interpreted to forbid any illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad for fear they could lead to idolatry. Media outlets say they have reprinted them sometimes to illustrate stories about the controversy but also, in some cases, to support the principle of free speech.

CBS News correspondent Richard Roth reports that in most of Europe — even France, which has the content's largest Muslim population — the cartoons have caused controversy, but hardly any confrontation. Europe's immediate worry is over what's happening outside its borders, where its citizens and embassies are suddenly facing risk.

It's become a dangerous debate, but there is still time to find a way out, says British government advisor on Muslim affairs Tariq Ramadan.

"We all cherish freedom of speech, but with a reasonable approach and a reasonable use of it," Ramadan tells Roth. "If we come to this, it is a debate. If not, then it is a power struggle. Who is going to win, the Muslim principles or the Western principles?"

Violence has escalated sharply in Afghanistan this week, where seven people have died in the past two days. Protests, sometimes involving armed men, have been directed at a slew of foreign and Afghan government targets — fueling suspicions that there's more to the unrest than offense to religious sensitivities.

In related developments:

Denmark's prime minister called the protests over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons a "global crisis" and appealed Tuesday for calm. "We are now facing a growing global crisis," Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a news conference as thousands of Muslims worldwide continued to protest over the caricatures first published in Denmark. Muslim demonstrators have set fire to the Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon, and rallied in Indonesia, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere. "It now is something else than the drawings ... now it has become an international political matter," Fogh Rasmussen said. "I urge calm and steadiness.'"

In Washington, George Bush called Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to express his "solidarity and support." Muslim crowds have attacked Danish diplomatic buildings in various countries — and on Tuesday, Danes were advised to leave Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Tuesday the West's publication of the prophet pictures was an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over the victory of the militant Hamas group in the Palestinian elections last month. "The West condemns any denial of the Jewish holocaust, but it permits the insult of Islamic sanctities," Khamenei said.

In a new turn, a prominent Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, invited artists to enter a Holocaust cartoon competition, saying it wanted to see if freedom of expression — the banner under which many Western publications reprinted the prophet drawings — also applied to Holocaust images.

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