Also, can I ask you, for the sake of arugment, to briefly put aside what was, in my view, but obviously not others’, uncivil, but fairly common, behaviour (we’re all aware of worse visual and verbal sacrilege against a great number of different religions, let alone the far worst sacrilege against illiterate people’s beliefs and livelihoods by greedy governements and large mineral extraction or timber operations), and answer another question.

Quite what should one do when folk want to be uncivil? Should I tut tut something that, to be frank, in an different circumstances would not have raised an eyebrow (indeed, I’ve seen all sorts of offensive cartoons aimed at Muslims in mainstream US papers, and no doubt, there are much worse things being said & printed the moment you move toward the red press)? Should I tut tut now that this particular case proved otherwise? Surely, ex post tut tut-ting makes no sense, and ex ante tut tut-ting is just about impossible undertake with any prospect of correctly guessing when nastiness will emerge?

Damned if you do and damned if you dont.

As per usual, the villains are fanaticism and the us versus them mentality. In case it is some consolation, the Islamic fanatics have a long way to go before they challenge the score of corpses racked up by militant Marxists. History is repeating itself and far too few lefties have learned the lessons of the recent past.

I’m not saying that we’re particularly far ahead of anyone in today’s world, but religious violence is out. Protest, whine, threaten with eternal damnation all you wish; but attacking embassies because you don’t like a picture is just bonkers.

Links on my blog, post titled ‘more caricatures’ (click on my name above) More in previous posts titled ‘morning danish’ and ‘i’ve been meaning’

At this point a group of ultra-conservative Danish imams decided to take matters into their own hands, setting off on an ambitious tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier containing the inflammatory cartoons.

According to Jyllands-Posten, the imams from the organisation Islamisk Trossamfund took three other mysteriously unsourced drawings as well, showing Muhammad with the face of a pig; a dog sodomising a praying Muslim; and Muhammad as a paedophile. “This was pure disinformation. We never published them,” Lund complained. But the campaign worked.

Similar accounts have also surfaced in more reliable sources such as blogs:

However, the Danish Muslim delegation showed much more than the 12 cartoons published by Jyllands Posten. In the booklet it presented during its tour of the Middle East, the delegation included other cartoons of Mohammed that were highly offensive, including one where the Prophet has a pig face. But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that “mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty.” And in a quintessential exercise in taqiya, Abu Laban has praised the boycott of Danish goods on al Jazeera, while condemning it on Danish TV.

It should also be noted that an SBS news report showed one of the fabricated cartoons, depicting Mohammed as a pig, while implying that it was one of the real ones. This reflects either extremely sloppy fact-checking, or outright bias at SBS.