20 French embassies closed Friday

Muslim and Arab leaders on Wednesday denounced cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine, as another insult to their faith but urged people to shun a violent reaction and to protest peacefully. The French government ordered its embassies and French schools abroad to close on Friday as a precautionary measure in about 20 countries. US stand The White House on Wednesday questioned Charlie Hebdo’s judgment, but said the decision was no justification for violence.     “We have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said, while adding “it is not in any way  justification for violence.” “We don’t question the right of something like this to be published, we  just question the judgment  behind the decision to publish it,” Carney said. It immediately shut down the French Embassy and the French school in Tunisia. The Arab League called the cartoons “provocative and outrageous.” It said in a statement that they could increase the volatile situation in the Arab and Islamic worlds since the release of the film. The League appealed to Muslims offended by the cartoons to “use peaceful means to express their firm rejection.” “This is a disgraceful and hateful, useless and stupid provocation,” Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Paris Mosque, said. “(But) we are not Pavlov’s animals to react at each insult.” The French Foreign Ministry issued a travel warning urging French citizens in the Muslim world to exercise “the greatest vigilance,” avoiding public gatherings and “sensitive buildings.” The United States temporarily closed its consulate in an Indonesian city because of similar demonstrations. About 300 members of Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a pan-Islamic movement, rallied peacefully on Wednesday in front of it. Hundreds protested the film in Sri Lanka’s capital, burning effigies of President Barack Obama. Egyptian authorities deployed five large security trucks with riot police outside the French Embassy in Cairo as a precautionary measure but there were no signs of protests. The acting head of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Essam Erian, said the French judiciary should deal with the issue as firmly as it had handled the case against the magazine which published topless pictures of Britain’s Duchess of Cambridge, the wife of Prince William. Mahmoud Ghozlan, spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, welcomed French government criticism of the cartoons but said that French law should deal with insults against Islam in the same way as it deals with Holocaust denial. In Lebanon, leading Salafist cleric Sheikh Nabil Rahim said the cartoons could lead to more violence. Egypt’s prestigious Al Azhar institution for Islamic denounced the cartoons as “spiteful trivialities which promote hatred in the name of freedom.” In Tunisia, Ennahda party, leading the first elected government in the birthplace of the Arab Spring, condemned the cartoons as an “agression” against Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). It urged Muslims to avoid falling into a trap designed by “suspicious parties to derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West” and a conflict amongst Muslims. From gulftoday