Follow-up On Danish Cartoons - Conspiracy?

As the Iraqi website Iraq The Model suggested yesterday, the world is waking up to the very real possibility that the extensive violence we are seeing linked to the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet, Muhammed, was a setup. Believable suggestions are being made that these violent protests have been arranged to offset European and American pressures to 1. stop Iran’s development of nuclear weapons (God help us), 2. get Syria entirely out of Lebanon, and 3. reduce or stop financial aid to a Palestine government controlled by Hamas.

What we have learned overnight is that three additional cartoons which were never published, and which are much more offensive to Islamic sensibilities, were added to the Danish cartoons and broadcast by Islamic agencies to heighten and inflame violent protests, which were arranged and sponsored in various locations around the world.

One of many articles suggesting this scenario was by Thomas Lipton (excerpt):
February 7, 2006
The Cartoon Crisis Conspiracy and Moderate Muslims
By Thomas Lifson

“The cartoon crisis which has left embassies ablaze and sparked riots from Beirut to Bangkok and Jarkarta was a set-up job, planned and executed by a group of Muslim leaders from Denmark in concert with leading lights of the Islamic world. The conspirators used supremely inflammatory phony cartoons never published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten to gin up a campaign of violence and intimidation against Denmark, the EU, and the West.

The instantaneous availability of Danish flags for burning in obscure outposts of the Muslim world suggests a great deal of advance planning.

Those involved in taking a four-month-old incident in far-away Denmark and making it into a crisis roiling the streets of Beirut, Bangkok and Jakarta among other Muslim outposts, include Arab League Secretary Amr Moussa, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque Sheikh Mohammad Sayyed Tantawi, and Sunni Islam’s most influential scholar, Yusuf al Qaradawi, according to Lorenzo Vidino of the Counter Terrorism Blog.”


None of this excuses the violent behavior of the protesters, but the three additional cartoons are obviously designed to inflame passions and not to illustrate and inform as the original cartoons were. Now let’s see and hope for a counter-reaction from the sane majority of the Muslim world.

It was also interesting today to see the juxtapositioning the New York Daily News did of the Muslim rioting and the weirdness of the US Senate hearings on eavesdropping of al-Queda:


“Rogue regimes exploit the rage

What a jackpot Islam's professional flamethrowers have just hit with this Danish-cartoon business. There hasn't been an eruption of Muslim rage like this since that earthshaking Newsweek squib alleging that Guantanamo guards were defiling Korans, and that was just a brush fire, quickly subsiding. This one's an inferno.

Bloody rioting has broken out in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, Kabul, New Delhi, Gaza, Mogadishu, Algiers and elsewhere. In London itself, Muslim mobs demanded beheadings. Indeed, the orchestrators of such "spontaneous" uprisings have spotted as gloriously incendiary an opportunity as might ever get handed to them on a plate.

And make no mistake, it's the Islamofascist puppetmasters who are running this show: "A network of fundamentalism that is deliberately fanning the flames," as Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini put it yesterday - specifically, singling out the provocateur Syrian and Iranian governments. "We are sitting on a powder keg."

That we are. Note that Damascus is in high heaven, as Syrian dictator Bashar Assad gave the green light to rioting that attacked the Danish, Norwegian, Chilean and Swedish embassies. As the White House pointed out, violent uprisings of that nature don't happen in Syria "without government knowledge and support."

Note, too, that Tehran has pointedly equated the Danish toons with the International Atomic Energy Agency's referral of Iran's nuclear ambitions to the UN Security Council, as if the IAEA watchdog mechanism is in and of itself Islamophobic.

And the puppetmasters will see to it that those mobs believe exactly that. They are exploiting the offense that many Muslims feel at the depictions of the Prophet Muhammed in cartoons that originated in a Danish magazine and have since been published in numerous outlets. And they are overwhelming the voices of reason that have been few and far between as the conflagration has inexorably grown.

Fantasyland

Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, it was all too easy to forget that the U.S. faces an enemy of limitless ambition and fanaticism. The escape of an Al Qaeda operative who masterminded the destroyer Cole bombing, the start of death penalty proceedings against the only 9/11 plotter brought to justice and the rioting across the Muslim world over cartoons all seemed on a plane separate and apart from the Senate - which is to say, in the real world.

The panel's grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over what's wrongly been called domestic spying amounted to a head-in-the-clouds debate over the limits of presidential power. As commander in chief authorized to combat Al Qaeda, President Bush may eavesdrop without a warrant on conversations to and from abroad, said Republicans. What Bush is doing is patently illegal, his critics asserted.

The committee would have been equally unproductive had it spent the day rehashing whether a falling tree makes a sound if there's no one in the forest. Worse, spurning Gonzales' assurances that the National Security Agency targets only callers believed to be agents, operatives or affiliates of Al Qaeda, the Democrats seemed most intent on battling a phantom menace of perceived civil rights violations - and not the very real threats confronting America.”