The Latest Sutton Impact + Danish Cartoon Uproar

Long-time Facade Friend Ward-o pays no heed to the thronging, rioting masses around the world protesting the Danish-Muhammed cartoons and pushes the envelope with his latest Village Voice cartoon (which hits the nail right on the head).

Warren Olney of KCRW/NPR's To The Point news discussion show talked with David Renny [sp?] of the London Telegraph about how this giant snowball got rolling. Here's my quickie transcription:

David Renny: There was a group of Danish imams and activists who initially tried to get this going in Denmark. They contacted ministers, they tried to arrange meetings with newspapers. They got frustrated, some time about a month after these cartoons were first published, in September last year. They got frustrated and decided to take their case abroad. And what they did, which is getting them a lot of criticism back home in Denmark, is they put together a dossier--a 43-page dossier--which contains the 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammed that were published in the Danish newspaper.

But they also put in some other material. The most controversial thing they did, is it turns out that they put in three extra cartoons of the prophet Muhammed, which are highly offensive, even obscene, which were not published in any Danish newspaper. And they put those at the back of the dossier, which they then carried to Egypt and to Lebanon, where they met some very senior figures from the Arab League, some senior clerics including the mufti of Egypt and the grand imam of al-Azar [sp?], who's a very influential figure in Cairo. Now, the question mark is, did they make it sufficiently clear that these three extra images were not published in the Danish press, and what were those images doing in the dossier? And certainly, their work does seem to have set the ball rolling.

Renny later notes that the imams in Copenhagen stated that the extra images were "flagged up in the dossier as not being from the Danish press. What they say... is that they were received by Danish muslims as hate mail from racist white supremecist groups in Denmark, and they put them in the dossier to show the kind of atmosphere that exists of racism and Islamaphobia, in their words, in Denmark.

More on the flip...

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Renny: One of the interesting question people have a right to ask is, how come it took so long for this to become a really big deal. These cartoons were published in September. There was sort of rumbling about this in the Arab media and the Arab world at various conferences, but it only really took off in January. The best answer I can get from different people is that during the Hajj in January in Mecca, you have 2.5 million Muslim pilgrims at that time. There are a lot of conferences, talking sessions, debates. And this issue really took off at that point. And immediately after that, you see the trade boycott against Danish goods in the Gulf Arab states. There are some very influential sermons in Mecca and Medina, which are televised.

Olney: How effective has the trade boycott been?

Renny: It's been pretty crippling. There are a couple of Danish companies, particularly a Danish dairy company called Arla, which is losing millions of dollars a day, and which is starting to lay off workers. It seems to sell a lot of milk and cheese and stuff in the Middle East. You can even see things like Nestle, which is of course a Swiss company, felt it necessary to place full-page ads in the Saudi papers last week saying Nestle would like to point out we're Swiss, we're not Danish. We don't buy any of our goods from Denmark.

On NPR/Slate's Day to Day program, Madeleine Brand talked with the BBC's Julian Isherwood about the protests and the boycott of Danish goods:

Brand: We have trade boycotts of Danish goods, Danes being advised to leave Muslim countries for their own safety, and international denunciations of the Danish press. How are the people, there in Denmark, reacting to this?

Isherwood: Well, I think Danes have become very bemused about this, to be quite frank. First of all, I think they're very afraid. I think Danish industry is very worried. But I think Denmark, in general, is very bemused. I mean, these were 12 cartoons that would, under normal circumstances, be a normal part of the Danish debate. It wasn't expected that they go abroad, and they were part of a very local domestic debate. The fact I think they developed, the whole issue has developed as it has, has made the Prime Minister and I think most Danes agree, think that this has now become and international crisis of clash of cultures between the Muslim countries and the West that has gone far far beyond the caricatures of the prophet Muhammed.