The Cartoon Controversy was a set-up
Charles Moore in the Telegraph on why the Cartoon Controversy has had the whiff of rancid Havarti from the beginning:
Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of “spontaneous” Muslim rage, the odder it seems.
The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had. It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking.
And from a previous Telegraph story on the Danish imams trying to retail their outrage abroad when it failed to sell at home:
The group created a 43-page dossier on what they said was rampant racism and Islamophobia in Denmark and took it to politicians and leading clerics in Egypt and Lebanon in a series of trips late last year. The Danish media have tried to question the Muslim delegates on how they came to include three extra, obscene cartoons in the dossier, in addition to the 12 images that started the row when they were published by a Danish newspaper in September. The extra cartoons, whose origins remain obscure, show Mohammed with a pig’s snout, a dog raping a praying Muslim and Mohammed as a “paedophile demon”….
Mr Akkari insisted that his group travelled to the Middle East to seek support only after failing to win a hearing in Denmark. He said they chose to travel to moderate nations such as Egypt and Lebanon, deliberately to avoid inflaming trouble. “If we really wanted war and to make people angry, we should have travelled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia from the beginning,” he said.
We would like to know the name of the PR firm they used. Oh yeah, al Jazeera!
UPDATE
When we wrote that al Jazeera was the PR agency, we didn’t know how right we were. See Powerline and Amir Taheri for details.