The Arab European League (AEL) is being prosecuted for insulting Jews by publishing a cartoon suggesting they invented the Holocaust, the Dutch public prosecution office said today.
Last month, Dutch prosecutors ordered the league to remove the cartoon from its website or face prosecution. The cartoon was punishable, they found, “because it offends Jews on the basis of their race and/or religion”, Agence France Press reports in The Peninsula. The public prosecution office said it told the AEL two weeks ago that publishing the cartoon was illegal but that it would drop the case if the group removed the cartoon from its website within two weeks and agreed not to republish it.
According to Reuters reports in SABC News, Abdoulmouthalib Bouzerda, chairman of the Dutch AEL, said the group had published a disclaimer at the time saying it did not support the views of the cartoons it used. Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports that the AEL acquiesced to the request, but then it put the cartoon back on the website claiming that the ruling was an instance of double standards, since the republication of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad was allowed in the Netherlands. It removed cartoon once again on September 2. Finally, DutchNews reports that the cartoon was taken off the AEL’s website three years ago, but the league decided to republish it to highlight the double standards operating in society, as the AEL prosecution comes after a decision not to put politician Geert Wilders on trial for republishing Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad on his website.
