Ag, everyone has their boogeyman.  I think Cole is wrong here, and it's a mistake to lay the blame at any single country's door.

I mean, maybe Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit tried to distract people from the elections by talking about the cartoons, but it sure as hell didn't work.  I went back and checked old newspapers, just to be sure, and I mean the Arabic ones too, not just the insipid English paper.  All of November and early December were totally dominated by election news here, as well as the usual simpering press reports of Mubarak's message to the Barcelona conference on something-or-other...  

I do remember hearing something about the cartoons way back then, but I would hardly categorize it as a major distraction.  It was a blip.  Although the Egyptian parliament's involvement is unique, Egypt didn't join in the boycott until well after the Gulf states did so, and there has been exactly one protest, which was yesterday and nowhere near the Danish and Norwegian embassies.

But Cole is spot on with his next statement:

Most of the caricature protests are a mixture of local politics and standard post-colonial anti-imperialism.

Yep.