The "Cartoon Jihad" - The Lie That Doesn't Die

Andrew Cochran

A court in Belarus jailed, for three years, a newspaper editor who reprinted cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that first appeared in Denmark in 2005. So the phenomenon dubbed the "cartoon jihad" has claimed another set of victims: first, the editor who simply reproduced the cartoons at the center of the controversy; and second, the entire nation of Belarus, which has now lost more of its freedom. But it's important to remember a key ingredient in the history of the "cartoon jihad": the fact that the outcry in the Muslim world did not begin in earnest until Islamists showed off a number of fabricated cartoons which were never actually published by the newspaper in Denmark. After the 12 original cartoons were published in Denmark in September 2005, an imam there took a delegation to the Middle East to complain to Arab leaders and Islamic scholars about the published cartoons. But, as Lorenzo Vidino reported on The Counterterrorism Blog on February 2, 2006, that imam went much further:

"However, the Danish Muslim delegation showed much more than the 12 cartoons published by Jyllands Posten. In the booklet it presented during its tour of the Middle East, the delegation included other cartoons of Mohammed that were highly offensive, including one where the Prophet has a pig face. But these additional pictures were NOT published by the newspaper, but were completely fabricated by the delegation and inserted in the booklet (which has been obtained and made available to me by Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet). The delegation has claimed that the differentiation was made to their interlocutors, even though the claim has not been independently verified. In any case, the action was a deliberate malicious and irresponsible deed carried out by a notorious Islamist who in another situation had said that "mockery against Mohamed deserves death penalty."

Only then did the deadly riots begin, with a number of deaths and injuries. And it started with a lie. Here is a sample of posts on CTB about the "cartoon jihad":

"We Want Blood on the Streets of England" by Evan Kohlmann
The Cartoon Offensive by Walid Phares
The Cartoon Riots: The Price of Freedom by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Credible threats against the Danish cartoonists by Olivier Guitta
After the Danish Cartoon Controversy by Lorenzo Vidino