The cartoons were a hush-hush affair in the Muslim world for many months after they were first published, since most of the European Muslims did not found to wise to make an issue of it and adopted the first best policy of ignoring. The Jeddah based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) representing 57 Muslim states offered a mild protest by cancelling the Islamic cultural exhibition that was planned for Copenhagen. The ambassadors of the OIC countries sought a meeting with the Prime Minister of Denmark to register their anguish and concern over the publication, and that was that. But then happened some unrelated incidents like pressure on the Iranian government to show flexibility on the nuclear issue and on Syria to cooperate on the Hariri murder issue and the whole scenario changed in a matter of days. The Syrian embassies worldwide popularized the issue of cartoons till furies were high enough. Elements within the Iranian government, not necessarily with the permission of President Ahmadinejad, used, rather abused, the militant student wings, loyal to the Islamist regime, to ransack the Dutch embassy in Tehran. In Damascus, however, where political activity has been throttled for four decades, the arson was done by the members of the security forces themselves in plain clothes. The whole operation was being coordinated by intelligence guys with their typical black sun glasses coordinating with each other on government wireless sets. The third and last incident of Danish embassy arson was in Beirut where the Lebanese government did all in its power to stop it and even arrested 400 people, half of them Syrian passport holders, was manifestly masterminded by the Syrian government. The Beirut arson received massive coverage in the Western media, the conspirators won, and the die was cast.

Within days it was an out and out hate campaign between Muslims and Christians. The more the Muslims showed resentment over the cartoons, the more the Western papers and websites and blogs reproduced them in the name of freedom of expression. The clash of civilization theorists were having a field day, chuckling in their study armchairs how true their analyses were. The biggest net gainers are the extreme right wing parties both in the Western and the Muslim worlds. “We told you so!”, they would tell their gullible electorate, that “they” are against “us”. The attacks in Pakistan against the local fast food restaurants and a Korean bus company were instigated by local food outlet owners and traditional transporters who failed to compete with the efficiency of KFC and MacDonalds or Daewoo buses, respectively.

The riots in Nigeria reflect deep rooted hostility between Hausa Northerners and Ibo Southerners, and have more to do with Southerner President Obasanjo’s attempts to twist the constitution to hang on to the power for a third time, than with the cartoons per se.

The riots from Libya to Afghanistan, wherever they went violent, were manipulated by vested interests for their own ends and were about poverty and ignorance rather about cartoons.

One must underline here that neither the right wingers of Europe wearing T-shirts caricaturing the prophet, nor those in Middle East who now use floor mats imprinted in Danish flag or using toilet papers of the same design for personal hygiene, reflect the thought patterns of the broader community they belong to. The hundreds of thousands of reprints of cartoons by European press was wrong and irresponsible, and so was the spate of millions of text and MMS messages on the mobile sets in the Middle East caricaturing the Queen of Denmark, known for her unflattering opinions about Muslims which she blurts out rather generously, as a whore. The truth is that there is a huge cultural chasm and communication gap where Europeans do not understand the extremes of reverence that many Muslims have for the prophet and the Muslims fail to grasp the sensitivity of holocaust issue in the West. In Europe, the Jerry Springer opera in London has been showing Jesus in its stage plays as a homosexual. Last year, Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, a novel insinuating that the Christ had a sexual life, made a debut and sold millions of copies. There has not been any protest from the people on either, so the Europeans wonder why are the Muslims so irked by their prophet being shown as a bomber and where has the Muslims’ sense of humour gone when it comes to a jibe on the prophet. The Muslims, on the other hand, know that anybody could have gone to jail in Europe on anti-semitism charge if the butt of jokes were a Jew, let alone prophet Moses. So much so that there are laws criminalizing racism against much smaller Sikh community in Europe where the existence of the world “Sikh” may well be a news for majority citizens. “Why, insensitivity towards us?” the Muslims wonder.

In fact, Europe has its own red lines and none of the countries is particularly known for allowing freedom of expression on its base values. Denmark is least known for such freedoms where glorifying fascism, anti Semitism and holocaust revisionism are just few in the long list of checks on freedom. In fact, in seven European countries it is a criminal offence to say that Hitler did not kill six million Jews. The case of most respected European Historian David Irving who was jailed for three years in Austria last month for his book in 1989 where he claimed that the deaths of Jews in Auswitch concentration camp had been hugely exaggerated. The old man at 67 did not want to go to jail, so he apologized to the Court and revised his earlier belief saying that he has found new historical evidence that actually as many Jews were killed as claimed, but the whole jury was contemptuously biased and the judges not only handed him down the sentence but called him “racist” and “prostitute”. Lately, from his prison cell he gave an interview reaffirming his research finding that the holocaust was a myth. In neighbouring Germany, Ernst Zundel, deported from Canada recently is facing trial on 14 counts of holocaust denial. The massacre of Jews is not the only sensitive issue; the noted American historian scholar, Bernanrd Lewis, not the least known for any sympathy with the Muslims, was convicted and sentenced by a Paris court in 1980’s for a research in which he found out that Turkish massacre of Armenians was a myth. Today, there has emerged a strong opinion in the European media that is telling the governments that lies cannot be countered by laws, but only by truths.

If a historical event had taken place, you cannot affirm it by jailing all the historians who say it did not, but by producing evidence that it did.