One member, Younus Abdullah Muhammad, told CNN last year that the 9/11 attacks had been justified.Īt other times, its website has called for wrath to fall "on the Jewish occupiers of Palestine. The group has a record of making extremist statements, which it tempers with disclaimers that it is nonviolent to avoid legal trouble.
He is shown in one photograph on the site carrying a machete with what look like suicide bombs strapped around his waist. It was founded by Yousef al-Khattab, a former secular Jew born Joseph Cohen who ran a bicycle pedicab in New York until he relocated to Morocco. The latest controversy has cast the light on Revolution Muslim, a group of probably fewer than 10 extremists based in New York who hand out leaflets outside the moderate 96th-street mosque. In that case, however, there was no pickup from Islamist groups. In 2006, soon after violent protests erupted against the Danish cartoons, Stone and Parker produced a double episode that featured the prophet and was also censored by Comedy Central. This was the second time that South Park had taken on the prophet as a subject. In this week's episode, the bear costume was unzipped to reveal that Santa Claus, not Muhammad, had been inside all along. In the storyline, the prophet was brought into the show on the demand of previous victims of its satire, led by Tom Cruise, who believed that he could make them immune to further ridiculing. The joke was that Muhammad was dressed as a bear because he could not be shown as a cartoon in the wake of death threats made against Danish cartoonists by Islamist extremists, who see any depiction of Muhammad as a gross insult to their religion. The Muhammad furore began last week in the show's 200th episode when the creators introduced the character as a riff on censorship. The apportioning of responsibility will come as a relief to devotees of the animation, who have grown accustomed to it treating nothing and nobody as sacred. "I can't go into the thinking behind it, but I can confirm it was Comedy Central that inserted the bleeps and not South Park," a spokesman for the station said. "Do you seriously think that will appease the extremists from more terrorism?" one wrote.Īs controversy raged, Comedy Central confessed that it was responsible for the cuts. In the aftermath of the show's censorship, the chatrooms on South Park's website hummed with the indignation of its fans. They also listed the New York headquarters of Comedy Central, the cable television channel that broadcasts the show, and South Park's production company, adding: "You can pay them a visit at these addresses." To underline the point, the website carried a picture of Van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker killed in 2004 after he made a documentary on the abuse of women in Muslim countries, with his throat cut and a knife in his chest. The group, through its website, had reacted to last week's episode of South Park which first depicted Muhammad dressed as a bear by saying its originators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, "will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh". The censorship followed a warning from a New York-based group of extremist Muslim converts that could be construed as a death threat. Fans and pundits alike were taken aback last night when an episode featuring the prophet Muhammad purportedly dressed in a bear costume had bleeps and "Censored" blocks slapped liberally throughout to remove all audio and visual reference to the prophet. Now the caustic animated satire appears to have reached its limits within the confines of mainstream US television. Mormons, Scientologists, Catholics, Jews, politicians and film stars have all been skewered on the razor-sharp wit of South Park. They have depicted the Queen blowing her brains out after a failed attempt by the British army to reinvade America, Saddam Hussein as Satan's gay lover, and Jesus as a trigger-happy superhero.
In fact, Muhammad appeared in 2001, too about a threat against makers of the satirical cartoon series South Park. The article below said that Islam's prophet has featured twice in the series: this year, and in 2006. The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 28 April 2010