Rage against the cartoons

This cartoon thing has never made any sense to me. For starters:

* Muslims themselves have long created images of Mohammed. (linked site may not be working due to heavy traffic)

* That isn't much of a surprise given that the Koran does not explicitly prohibit images of Mohammed.

* When the Danish cartoons were published last year in an Egyptian newspaper there was no backlash.

* They're freakin' cartoons. In Denmark.

Today's New York Times provides a more likely explanation:

But the pressure began building as early as October, when Danish Islamists were lobbying Arab ambassadors and Arab ambassadors lobbied Arab governments.

"It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the O.I.C. took a stance against it," said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.

He said the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look, this is the democracy they're talking about.' "

The Washington Post also has an article detailing how others have hijacked the issue for their own ends.