Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiite Muslims turned a religious ceremony on Thursday into a peaceful protest against a series of cartoons in the Western media lampooning the Prophet Mohammad. The European Union sought to calm tension, calling for a voluntary media code of conduct to avoid further inflaming religious sensibilities, while the United States accused Iran and Syria of deliberately stoking Muslim rage.
The leader of Lebanon's Hizbollah group pledged no compromise until there was a full apology from Denmark, where the cartoons were first appeared, and European countries passed laws prohibiting insults against the prophet. "Today, we are defending the dignity of our prophet with a word, a demonstration, but let [US President] George Bush and the arrogant world know that if we have to... we will defend our prophet with our blood, not our voices," Hizbollah group leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told the crowd.