Tony Paterson from Berlin reports in The Independent of today: “A production of a Mozart opera in which the severed head of the Muslim prophet Mohamed is shown on stage was dropped by one of Berlin’s main opera houses yesterday, because of fears that the work might provoke a terrorist attack by Islamic extremists.”

The decision by Berlin’s Deutsche Oper to cancel Mozart’s Idomeneo provoked uproar among German politicians and directors, who said the opera house had allowed itself to be intimidated.

“This is mad,” said Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s Interior Minister. Bernd Neumann, the Culture Minister, added: “If fears about possible protests result in self-censorship, then the democratic principles of free speech are in danger.”

Kirstin Harms, Deutsche Oper’s manager, said the company had received information from Berlin police which suggested that the work could provoke what she described as an “incalculable security risk”.

Berlin police yesterday denied that they had received any concrete threat of an attack, but said they had warned that “disruptions could not be ruled out”.

In the opera house’s production of the Mozart work that was first shown in 1871, the Cretan king, Idomeneo, holds up the severed heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddah and Mohamed. When the production by the director Hans Neuenfels was first shown in 2003, several religious groups said that they were offended.

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At SustainabiliTank.info we have difficulty taking position on this issue. On the one hand it might be indeed time to rethink our ways of expression - but then our right to question things must be preserved - even if when we realize that it is nothing more then an effective way to argue by way of exageration. Further, those that might protest seeing Muhamed’s head in effigy, are actually the same people that made it into a steady habit to smear us - the freely thinking people of the world - just in order to spite us. Every time we give in by decreasing our ways of freely expressing ourselves when stimulating our minds using symbolic forms of expression - we are in effect regressing to the dark ages of the period where our opponents, sadly for themselves, still remain stuck in their mental practice. What if tomorrow they decide that the green color has religious significance, will I not be allowed to wear a green tie if that color’s significance to me is rather the environment? Are we called to give up voluntarily our freedoms because some folks strive not to have free minds?