The Instigators

The Wall Street Journal in its issue of Feb 7 reports that 'Egypt's secular government' helped the Danish Islamicclerics as it was "eager to burnish their image as defenders of Islam"thus providing "an important initial impetus for the protests".

Initial protest and threat calls were treated by Jyllands-Posten asroutine. Police found one of the callers to be mentally ill. But then followedthe sermons by clerics in Copehhagen to denounce the paper. In Aarhus, Denmark's second-largest city, a radical cleric gave an interview denouncingthe features editor, Flemming Rose, reminding him of "what happened" to Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker murdered in 2004 by a Dutchman of Moroccan descent.

And that is when Mr Ahmed Abu-Laban, a fundamentalist Palestinian cleric inCophengahen, and several others formed the "European Committee for Honoring the Prophet," an umbrella group that claims to represent 27 organizations across a wide spectrum of the Islamic community." WSJ finds that many moderate Muslims dispute this and say the group has been hijacked byradicals.

Mr Abu-Laban told WSJ that frustrated by Danish government's intransigence,[See time line, the Cartoon Controversy] "Our only option was take our case outsideDenmark". The cartoons were seen as the "last drop in a cup of resentment, disappointment andexploitation."

By then, there was growing interest from Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen andtheir home governments, including Egypt. As per the WSJ findings, Mr. Abu-Laban took charge of writing statements for the group and communicating with Muslim ambassadors. Hedenied "holding extremist views, but acknowledges hosting visits to Denmark by Omar Abdel Rahman, before his arrest in New York, where the blind sheik now is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."

The WSJ report establishes that "Mr. Abu-Laban began working closely with Cairo's embassy in Copenhagen, holding several meetings with Egypt's ambassador to Denmark, Mona OmarAttia.

'Egypt's embassy played a fundamental role,' he told the WSJ.. Egypt and other Arab regimes saw the furor as a good opportunity'to counteract pressure from the West' and 'to show people they are good Muslims.'

Egypt's Ambassador to Copenhagen, Ms. Attia, told the WSJ that she wasn't motivated by political concerns but by personal outrage. "I was very angry. I was very upset," shetold the WSJ, describing the cartoons as an unacceptable insult to all Muslims. Sheacknowledged meeting with the Danish clerics several times but denied coordinating strategy with them.

But that was not all. Mr. Abu-Laban and his colleagues were "keen to 'globalize' the crisis to pressure the Danishgovernment" and they prepared a dossier to distribute during their visitsto the Middle East where they took the controversy:

"The document, which exceeded 30 pages, featured copies of the published cartoons and Arabic media reports about the controversy. It also contained a group of highly offensive pictures that had never been published by the newspaper, including a photograph of a man dressed as a pig, with the caption: "this is the real picture of Muhammad."

"Ahmed Akarri, a 28-year-old Islamist activist involved in the committee, says the photographs had been sent to Danish Muslims anonymously and were included as examples of Denmark's anti-Muslim sentiment. He denies any attempt to mislead the Arab public about what had been published inJyllands-Posten.

"One member of the Danish delegation, Ahmed Harby, an Egyptian who runs a cleaning business in Copenhagen, says the trip wasn't designed to stir hatred against Denmark. It was intended, he says, to appease hotheads in Copenhagen and elsewhere who might take violent action if Jyllands-Posten wasn't forced to apologize. He says he didn't realize the dossier contained pictures the newspaper had never published.

"The delegation met with a special assistant to the foreign minister, with the head of al-Azhar, the Muslim world's oldest university, and with the Egyptian head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. During a meeting with Cairo's senior Muslim cleric, Mr. Harby says, a fatwa, or religious opinion, was drafted calling for a boycott of Danish goods. The order was never formally released, he says.

And then later in December, a second delegation traveled to Lebanon to "meet with religious leaders and appeared on television. Mr. Akarri, the Copenhagen activist, later traveled alone to Syria to deliver the dossier to Syria's senior Sunni cleric."

Likewise, in Jordan, a pro-Western monarchy, Parliament condemned the cartoons as "racist and evil." Tunisia and Libya, where police regularly arrest Islamist activists and block protests, also denounced them.Late last month, influential clerics in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere called for a boycott of Danish goods. Arab consumers began to shun Danish products en masse.

The world wide protest was on.