The Cartoon Hoax

A summary of events so far:

In early 2005, a Dane decided to write a children’s book about the story of Mohammed.  His goals were to increase understanding of Islam among Danish children, and to promote peace between cultures.

The standard convention is for children’s books to have pictures, so the author went shopping for an illustrator.  At this point, the writer ran into a roadblock.  No artist wanted the job because they were afraid of being targetted by Muslim terrorists.  Drawing images of Mohammed is considered verboten by some (but not all) sects of Islam.

At this point, a Danish newspaper learned of the writer’s difficulty, and the editors asked a question.  How strong really was the intimidation felt by Danish artists?  So they decided to perform a social experiment.  They sent out a call.  Who was willing to draw the prophet of Islam?  A few brave souls came forward.  The paper published 12 of their drawings on Sep 30/05.  An Egyptian paper also printed the cartoons about a month later.

William Kristol wryly describes Muslim reaction in Egypt:

…you surely must remember the anguish that provoked. Tens of millions of Egyptians were so tormented they could barely refrain from attacking Israel, slaughtering all foreign businessmen, and destroying the pagan Sphinx. So anguished was President Mubarak that he announced he would return his $2 billion in "infidel U.S. foreign aid." For his part, the chief Islamist televangelist on Al Jazeera, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was so anguished he repudiated the financing his branch of the Muslim Brotherhood receives from the "hatemongering European Union." Meanwhile in Iran, the nuclear program ground to a halt, as anguished engineers found they could no longer in good conscience consult technical manuals produced by Zionist and Crusader scientists.

You don’t remember any of that happening?  Maybe that’s because it didn’t.  Egyptian Muslims saw the cartoons in their press and gave a collective yawn.  Not ONE protest ensued.

Meanwhile, back in Denmark, certain Danish Muslim clerics were upset, and were angrily demanding apologies.  None were forthcoming.  So the clerics went grievance shopping in December, and took the cartoons to the Middle East.  Surely, they thought, their religious brethren would help them make the offending newspaper (and the Danish government) grovel before them.

They were disappointed in their efforts.  Middle Eastern clerics were unimpressed.  The Danish clerics must not have known about the earlier Egyptian response.  It looked like the Danish clerics would have to return home empty-handed.

At this point, they decided that dishonesty was the best policy.  They added three bogus cartoons to the twelve that were actually printed.  See if you can spot the fakes:

Pretty tough, huh?  The first fake shows Mohammed as a pedophile, the second as a pig-snouted creature, and the last depicts a worshipping Muslim being raped by a dog.  It was at this point that Middle-Eastern clerics started to get angry – at the phony drawings.

There’s a political element that shouldn’t be overlooked however.  The case of the murder of Lebanese Prime-Minister Rafiq al-Hariri may be referred to the UN Security Council soon.  And which country is due to assume the presidency of the Council within the next month or so?  Denmark.  What better way could there be to politically neuter the future president of the Council?  The legitimacy of the Security Council’s future decisions on the matter will now be under a cloud, at least in the Muslim world.

By the way, in which Muslim countries were Danish embassies torched?  Syria and Syrian-influenced Lebanon.  And who is the prime suspect in the Hariri murder?  Boy Assad of Syria.  What a co-inky-dink.

Syria is a police state, and "spontaneous" demonstrations of this nature simply don’t happen by themselves in police states.  The best that could be said is that the Syrian government allowed the riots to occur; the worst would be that they actually organized them.  There are more than a few similarities here with the 2005 anti-Japanese riots in China.

(Iran arrived at the party a bit late, but a similar calculus holds for them as well.  They also may face the Security Council in the not-too-distant future about their nuclear weapons program.  They’re poisoning the well so that when a decision is reached they can say that the president of the Security Council was biased against them.)

As for the violence in Pakistan and other places, that’s just monkey-see, monkey-do.  Or, to be more clinical, mass hysteria.  If your co-religionists are rioting over the cartoons, they must be pretty bad.  Bad enough for you to start rioting, too.

And that’s the story of the Cartoon Hoax, as I understand it.  The epilogue to the story is that the writer of the children’s book that started the whole saga finally found an illustrator.  The book was published near the end of January 2006, and is doing quite well, thank you.

And contrary to initial fears, there has been no Muslim outrage about the artwork.

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UPDATE:  The Toronto Star makes a point that seems so obvious, it’s a wonder no one else has said it yet:

…for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.

…the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage, saying, `Look, this is the democracy they’re talking about.’"

UPDATE (Feb 15/06):  Another interesting idea was advanced in the Feb 15/06 edition of The Bangkok Post.  (Sorry, no link is available.) The column, "Assad sends defiant message to the West," by Khaled Yacoub Oweis points out that Syria needs to:

[calm] Saudi Arabia’s anger over the killing of Hariri, who held a Saudi as well as a Lebanese passport and was close to the Saudi monarchy.

Rallying against a common enemy such as Denmark would be one way of facilitating forgetfulness regarding Syria’s role in Hariri’s murder.

UPDATE (Feb 18/06): Gateway Pundit has a day-by-day chronology of events, focusing mainly on the role of the Egyptian ambassador to Denmark.

UPDATE (Feb 18/06): As I said in my first post on this subject, the embassy burnings began while I was on vacation.  I wrote this to summarize for myself what a few other bloggers were saying.  There’s really nothing written in this post that wasn’t said first in one of these blogs:

The Brussels Journal – they were following the story before it even BECAME a story

The Belmont Club – good analysis

The Rantings of a Sandmonkey – the one who first realized that the cartoons had been published without outcry in Egypt back in October.  Interesting to read a pro-American Muslim’s take on the issue.

No Pasaran! – nice, short updates

UPDATE (Feb 19/06): Michelle Malkin has a column where she reveals that the Danish clerics lied in the Middle East by claiming the newspaper published not 12, but 120 Mohammed cartoons.  They also lied in telling their co-religionists that the newspaper was state-owned.

UPDATE (Feb 19/06): The origin of the pig-snouted Mohammed fake.  Paul Belian of The Brussels Journal makes the case that the creators of the phony illustration (the Danish Muslim clerics!) are the ones who are guilty of blasphemy.

Because the twelve [newspaper] cartoonists are not Muslims, the Muslim blasphemy laws do not apply to them…But these laws do apply to the imams…[that]…created their own three Muhammed images. Consequently, these imams deserve death. They – and no-one else – depicted the prophet as a pig – the highest imaginable insult in Islam.

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