THE
HAGUE: A Dutch cartoonist and political parties across the board hit out on
Saturday following his arrest and detention for alleged incitement to hatred in
his drawings.
Prosecutors said
eight cartoons by Gregorius Nekschott considered reprehensible had been pulled
from his website for "exceeding the limits" of freedom of expression.
Following a complaint by a
Muslim imam laid in 2005, Nekschott was arrested and his house searched on
Tuesday by police in Amsterdam. He was released on Friday.
Nekschott, whose caricatures
single out Islam and the Dutch political establishment, said in an interview
published on Saturday that in the Netherlands there was a tendency to muzzle
artists.
"In Denmark they
protect cartoonists, in the Netherlands police arrest them," he told the
left-wing daily
De
Volksrant
, referring to caricatures of the
prophet Mohammed in Danish newspapers, which caused a furore across the Muslim
world.
The public television
station
NOS
said that political parties from extreme-right to extreme-left, including the
Labour party, a member of the centre-left coalition government, had criticised
Nekschot's arrest.
Islam and
how to integrate minority communities have become contentious issues in the
Netherlands in recent years, particularly after film-maker Theo van Gogh was
murdered by a radical Muslim in 2004 for making a film critical of Islam's
treatment of women.
Far-right
lawmaker Geert Wilders fanned the flames of controversy again this year by
making his own film,
Fitna
,
which features violent imagery of terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid
intertwined with Koranic texts, and sparked outrage in Muslim countries.
The reaction to Wilders' film
was still less than the violent protests which followed the printing of the
Danish cartoons in September 2005.
At least 17 Danish dailies
reprinted one of the cartoons in February, vowing to defend freedom of
expression a day after police in Denmark foiled a plot to murder the cartoonist.