Boston Globe reports:

A conservative student newspaper at Harvard University has become one of the few media outlets in the country to show inflammatory Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, angering students on campus and prompting a forum to discuss the controversy.

The four cartoons appeared in the Feb. 8 issues of The Harvard Salient, a conservative, biweekly newspaper, under the headline, ”A pox (err, jihad) on free expression.” The student editors called the cartoons, including a sketch of Mohammed carrying a bomb in his turban, ”relatively innocuous.”

”Publishing materials that criticize the ways Islam has been usurped worldwide for purposes of violence and oppression is a risky, but honest and necessary, business,” the editors wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Muslim students and others were angered when copies of the paper arrived on campus Thursday, calling the decision to reprint the cartoons a show of disrespect to Muslims. ”What really bothers them are that these are schoolmates who are out to offend them,” said Khalid M. Yasin, a junior and president of the Harvard Islamic Society. ”They’re people their age that are really attacking things that are very integral to their lives.”

Travis R. Kavulla, a junior and the editor of the paper, said the student journalists meant no disrespect to Muslims, and had hoped instead to provoke a debate on campus. ”Now that [the cartoons] have provoked such a firestorm around the world, it’s a shame that the mainstream media isn’t publishing them because many people don’t understand what they look like,” he said.

On the same page, the paper also reprinted two anti-Semitic cartoons that ran in newspapers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, including one that superimposed a swastika over the Star of David. After the paper was published, some students called for Kavulla to resign. Tomorrow night, the Harvard College Interfaith Council is hosting a forum to discuss the cartoons.

I hope the Salient staff holds fast, but the way things are going, it won’t be long before someone sues, apologizes, or resigns.

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