THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

Amir Taheri, an Iranian author, writes how wrong world leaders and the Media have been about the Mohammed cartoon crisis.

The protests and riots were not the result of spontaneous combustion among Muslims. They were the result of a calculated effort, manufactured by extremists.

Taheri provides this chronology:

The cartoons were published last September and, for more than three months, caused no ripples outside small groups of Salafi militants in Denmark.

In December, a group of Danish Muslim militants filled their suitcases with photocopies of the cartoons and embarked on a tour of Muslim capitals.

They failed to get to Tehran: The Iranians, being Shi'ites, saw them as Sunni activists bent on mischief. But they managed to go to Cairo, Damascus and Beirut and, were allowed to send emissaries to Saudi Arabia.

The Danish Muslim group also did something dishonest — it added a number of far more derogatory cartoons of the Prophet to the 12 published by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, and misled its interlocutors in Muslim capitals into believing that all had appeared in the Danish press.

In Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood told the Danish group that this was not the time to kick a fuss over the cartoons. The brotherhood was busy plotting its election strategy and pretending to be a "moderate" political party. The last thing it wanted was to be branded as a rabid anti-West force. The brotherhood leaders suggested that the matter be put on ice until January.

The Danish militants also received a negative reply from Hamas, the Palestinian radical movement. Hamas was busy trying to win a general election and needed to reassure at least part of the Palestinian middle classes. The Hamas advice was: Wait until after we have won.

The emissaries found a more sympathetic audience in Qatar — where the satellite-TV channel Al Jazeera (owned by the emir) specializes in inciting Muslims against the West and democracy in general. The channel's chief Islamist televangelist, Yussuf al-Qaradawi (an Egyptian preacher who is also a friend of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London), was all too keen to issue a "fatwa" to light the fuse. He then mobilized his network of Muslim Brotherhood militants in Europe to attack the cartoons and claim, falsely, that images were not allowed in Islam and that the Danish paper had violated "an absolute principle of The Only True Faith."

Thus the call for Jihad received its supposed "theological" green light.

Read more.

No wonder all those Danish flags were at the militants' disposal, available to be dramatically set ablaze so news photographers could capture the images and spread the flames around the world.

There was nothing spontaneous about this. The Free World was duped by Sunni-Salafi groups, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Bashar al-Assad.

All the hand-wringing about sensitivity and debate about freedom of expression was the result of a plot. The schemers exploited religious faith to achieve their ends, encouraging unrest in the Muslim World and a battle with the West.

Taheri goes on:

People watching TV news may think that the whole Muslim world is ablaze with righteous rage translated into "spontaneous demonstrations." The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, even if offended by cartoons which they have not seen, have stayed away from the street shows put on by the radicals and the Iranian and Syrian security services.

...The destruction of Danish and Norwegian embassies and consulates happened in only two places: Damascus and Beirut. Anyone who knows Syria would know that there are no spontaneous demonstrations in that dictatorship. (Even then, the Syrian secret police failed to attract more than 1,000 rent-a-mob militants.) And the Syrian government refused the Norwegian Embassy's request for additional police protection. It was clear that the Syrians wanted the embassies sacked.

The rent-a-mob attacks in Beirut were more cynical. The Syrian Ba'ath — which has been murdering, imprisoning or deporting Sunni-Salafi militants for years — was suddenly transformed from a radical secular and Socialist party into "the Vanguard of the Faith." The mob that committed the atrocities in Beirut was bused from Syria and consisted of Muslim Brotherhood militants who are never alloweddemonstratetate on their own account.

The Muslim crowds that have demonstrated over the cartoons seldom exceeded a few hundred; the Muslim segment of humanity is estimated at 1.2 billion. And only three of Denmark's embassies in 57 Muslim countries have been attacked.

For over a week now, the world has been obsessed with these cartoons.

The matter has been billed as a global crisis and a signal of the Apocalypse. When discussing the situation, liberal elitists have twisted themselves into knots, trying to accommodate their allegiance to political correctness as well as civil liberties. American-based news outlets have been played by militant schemers, once again proving themselves to be the useful idiots that they are.

All of this over a sham.

No one enjoys having their religious beliefs mocked. I believe Muslims the world over were justifiably offended by the cartoons; but that's a separate issue from this orchestrated effort to inflame the Arab World, led by militants using faith as a means to enrage.

The Danish Muslim gang who lied by adding cartoons that had never been published has done more damage to the Prophet and to Islam than the 12 controversial cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten.

The fight between Denmark and its detractors is not between the West and Islam. It is between democracy and a global fascist movement masquerading as religion.

As far as I'm concerned, I consider this cartoon uproar officially debunked. It's been exposed as empty pretense on the part of the violent demonstrators.

Taheri is so right when he states that this fight isn't Denmark v. protesters, or the West v. Islam.

His conclusion that the fight is really "between democracy and a global fascist movement masquerading as religion" is an excellent summation.

Enough said.