The on-going brouhaha about the cartoons offensive to Islam and the reaction to them is fascinating because there's so many angles to explore. As new details continue to emerge, it's clear that there is much more to the storyline of the Danish newspaper publishing the cartoons and Muslims around the world getting pissed than initially meets the eye. Today's WSJ provides more back-story in a piece called How Muslim Clerics Stirred Arab World Against Denmark (subscription required):
When Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at Denmark's leading newspaper, published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad late last September, he got an angry telephone call from a local Muslim news vendor who said he had removed the paper from his shelves in protest.
The complaint didn't cause much alarm. "We get calls every day from people complaining about something," recalls Mr. Rose. Anger over the cartoons, he figured, would flare out in "two or three days."
What he didn't figure was how local clerics and your good friends and mine (to the tune of $2 billion dollars a year in aid), the Egyptian government, would fan the flames:
In this volatile environment, a group of Danish Islamic clerics angered by the cartoons succeeded in enlisting help from Egypt's secular government, which has been struggling to contain a potent Islamist opposition. Secular forces in the Arab world, eager to burnish their image as defenders of Islam, provided an important initial impetus for the protests, but now are scrambling to control the fury.
Arab governments exaggerating grievances against Islam to distract attention from their own failings, release some pressure from their own problems with Islamic radicals, and build a little Jihad cred? Imagine that.
From his office at the Islamic Faith Society in Copenhagen, Ahmed Abu-Laban, a fundamentalist Palestinian cleric, has been at the forefront of a campaign to force an apology from the paper. "This was the last drop in a cup of resentment, disappointment and exploitation," he says.
Well at least he's not bitter about the opportunities for freedom that he's been given in Denmark. If life in Copenhagen is such a poisonous hell, why doesn't Ahmed move back to the paradise that is Gaza or the West Bank? Denmark, love it or leave it.
The cartoons were published Sept. 30, which Mr. Rose and his colleagues were unaware coincided with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Soon after the angry newspaper vendor called, a second-generation immigrant phoned the paper to make threats against the cartoonists. The caller, who was quickly found by police, turned out to be mentally ill.
After a few days, Mr. Rose thought the worst was over. Then clerics in Copenhagen and elsewhere used their sermons to denounce the paper. Ambassadors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and nine other Islamic countries requested a meeting with Denmark's center-right prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen declined, saying the state had no right to interfere with the country's free press. Angry local Muslim leaders organized protest rallies, demanding an apology. The paper refused.
Frustrated by the Danish government's response, the committee decided after a series of meetings in October and November that "our only option was take our case outside Denmark," Mr. Abu-Laban says. There was growing interest from Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen and their home governments, including Egypt.
Mr. Abu-Laban, who grew up in Egypt and was arrested there in the early 1980s after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for his preaching, took charge of writing statements for the group and communicating with Muslim ambassadors. He denies holding extremist views, but acknowledges hosting visits to Denmark by Omar Abdel Rahman, before his arrest in New York, where the blind sheik now is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Extremist? Heck no, just a couple of buds getting together to talk about the religion of peace.
Mr. Abu-Laban began working closely with Cairo's embassy in Copenhagen, holding several meetings with Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, Mona Omar Attia. "Egypt's embassy played a fundamental role," he says. Egypt and other Arab regimes saw the furor as a good opportunity "to counteract pressure from the West" and "to show people they are good Muslims," he says.
Ms. Attia, the ambassador, says she wasn't motivated by political concerns but by personal outrage. "I was very angry. I was very upset," she says, describing the cartoons as an unacceptable insult to all Muslims. She acknowledges meeting with the Danish clerics several times but denies coordinating strategy with them.
Keen to "globalize" the crisis to pressure the Danish government, Mr. Abu-Laban and his colleagues decided to send delegations to the Middle East.
Think globally, burn down embassies locally.
They prepared a dossier to distribute during the travels. The document, which exceeded 30 pages, featured copies of the published cartoons and Arabic media reports about the controversy. It also contained a group of highly offensive pictures that had never been published by the newspaper, including a photograph of a man dressed as a pig, with the caption: "this is the real picture of Muhammad."
Nothing like sexing up your presentation a bit to really stoke the fires.
The first delegation left for Cairo in early December. As that nation was about to hold the final round of the first democratic election in modern Egyptian history, the government was battling accusations from some quarters of insufficient piety. Ms. Attia, the ambassador, denies that authorities tried to manipulate the cartoon issue as an electoral ploy.
Manipulating false information for political purposes? Mubarak lied, embassies fried!
The delegation met with a special assistant to the foreign minister, with the head of al-Azhar, the Muslim world's oldest university, and with the Egyptian head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. During a meeting with Cairo's senior Muslim cleric, Mr. Harby says, a fatwa, or religious opinion, was drafted calling for a boycott of Danish goods. The order was never formally released, he says.
Later in December, a second delegation traveled to Lebanon to meet with religious leaders and appeared on television. Mr. Akarri, the Copenhagen activist, later traveled alone to Syria to deliver the dossier to Syria's senior Sunni cleric.
This is obviously not just an organic outpouring of Muslim rage, but rather a coordinated effort by various groups with a variety of motivations to stir the pot and bring the Islamic street to a boil. The problem with igniting such passions is that once they start to burn you can quickly lose control and the conflagration can spread far beyond anything you ever intended. Just ask Mr. Rose about the dangers of playing with fire:
Returning late one night to his Copenhagen apartment, Mr. Rose slumped in a leather sofa with his wife to watch the news. It showed protesters waving signs that read "Behead Those Who Insult Islam." "This whole thing is crazy, totally crazy," he groans. "I had no idea anything like this would happen."
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