Good for them!

Danish Papers Reprint Muhammad Cartoon

(AP) Denmark’s leading newspapers on Wednesday reprinted a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked deadly rioting in Muslim countries two years ago.

The papers said they wanted to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after Tuesday’s arrest in western Denmark of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon, which shows Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The drawing by Kurt Westergaard and 11 other cartoons depicting Muhammad enraged Muslims two years ago when they appeared in a range of Western newspapers.

It’s worth remembering that the cartoons in question barely got noticed until a Lebanese-born Muslim living in Denmark, Ahmad Akkari, began waving them around the middle east, in a dossier into which he’d inserted a number of cartoons that the Danes didn’t print, including one that portrayed Muhammad as a pedophile, and a photograph of a Danish man wearing a pig mask, taken during a Danish pig calling contest, that Akkari had re-captioned as being a photo taken of a Dane mocking Muhammad as a pig.

Akkari’s activities in the middle east arguably helped get the Danish embassy in Lebanon burned down.  When Israel later began attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon Akkari decided the Danes weren’t such bad folks after all and he hot-footed it back to the nation he helped rouse passions against, via his Danish residency and passport. Nice guy.

The sweet irony of angry mobs rioting and burning down embassies over a bunch of cartoons depicting Islam as a violent fanatical religion was, of course, lost on the protesters.  That kind of thing will reliably go past zealots of any faith, or none.