Last November, Abu Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian ... put together a delegation that traveled to the Middle East to discuss the issue of the cartoons with senior officials and prominent Islamic scholars. "We want to internationalize this issue so that the Danish government will realize that the cartoons were insulting, not only to Muslims in Denmark, but also to Muslims worldwide," said Abu Laban.... 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.Meanwhile in a sidebar to its story today on the controversy, the Associated Press sets out a more conventional explanation, focusing on the prohibition in Islamic law of any kind of depictions of Muhammad.
The Toronto Star carries an interesting story on comments by Ruth Mas, a lecturer in Islamic studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, who argues that the cartoons reflect not blasphemy, but racism. The article also quotes Michael Muhammad Pfaff, of the German Muslim League, who argues that the cartoons are reminiscent of the caricatures of Jews in the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Sturmer.
Finally, SFGate runs excerpts from editorials around the world on the controversy. (See prior related postings on the cartoon controversy 1, 2, 3 .)
