Monday, February 06, 2006

Spin doctoring from conservative Danish imams

Confirmation of my previous hypothesis. Via The Guardian (UK), the Danish newspaper claims to have been smeared with disinfo in the form of additional offensive cartoons:

At this point a group of ultra-conservative Danish imams decided to take matters into their own hands, setting off on an ambitious tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt with a dossier containing the inflammatory cartoons.
According to Jyllands-Posten, the imams from the organisation Islamisk Trossamfund took three other mysteriously unsourced drawings as well, showing Muhammad with the face of a pig; a dog sodomising a praying Muslim; and Muhammad as a paedophile. "This was pure disinformation. We never published them," Lund complained. But the campaign worked. Outwardly the row appeared to be calming down. But in Muslim cyber-chatrooms, on blogs, and across the internet, outrage was building fast.
From Denmark, the pictures were being pinged by SMS from Kuwait to Palestine. Then last week came the diplomatic explosion. Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Denmark for consultations, Libya shut its embassy.

According to a piece in The Daily Telegraph (UK), the pieces were not advertised as being from the newspaper, but added in to spin doctor the impression.

They carried with them a 43 page dossier, containing not 12, but 15 images of the Prophet Mohammed. The three extras were far more obscene, depicting Mohammed with a pig's snout and labeling him a paedophile, and showing a praying Muslim being raped by a dog.
The Muslim delegates insisted they made clear the three extra cartoons were not from "Jyllands-Posten", but were included to show the level of racism faced by Danish Muslims. They say the images came from hate mail sent, anonymously, to Danish Muslims.

Assuming for the moment that their claim is genuine, it is unfair to expect a newspaper, let alone an entire national government, to take responsibility for anonymous cartoons allegedly sent by unaffiliated xenophobes at some indeterminate amount of time in the past. The timing and juxtaposition was deliberate. Thus, the primary purpose of including the cartoons could only have been to incite and ensure outrage against the nation of Denmark, by increasing the overall level of outrage at the combined set of cartoons.

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