‘Hagar The Horrible’ Offends Muslims

Five Muslim fundamentalists offended by a “Hagar the Horrible” cartoon burst into the offices of an English-language newspaper Saturday and chased an editor out of the building at gunpoint.

The five were captured, one by a worker at the daily Arab Times and the others by police after a car chase, an Interior Ministry statement said. No one was injured.

The U.S. comic strip, about a boorish but lovable Viking and his eccentric family, showed Hagar on a hill saying: “I pray and pray, but you never answer me.”

A voice from the clouds answers: “Sorry if you don’t get through right away, keep trying. These days everyone wants to talk to me.”

Some Muslims saw the cartoon as sacrilegious. A magazine published by a group of fundamentalist Sunni Muslims said the comic strip was “mocking God and communication between humans and their God.”

The Al-Mujtama magazine accused the newspaper’s non-Muslim employees of poking fun at Kuwait’s laws and religion.

The newspaper ran an apology Thursday, 11 days after the cartoon appeared.