First there was the cartoon campaign, then there was the related violence. Not the other way round.

No, that's simply a lie. It doesn't get more true because you repeat it. The cartoons were published after a professor at the University of Copenhagen was bodily assaulted for reading from the Koran.

It would be an interesting debate if Danish Muslims would tell us what illustrations they would find proper in a children's book about the prophet Mohammed.

A large part of the controversy centered around the question of who gets to speak for "the Danish Muslims." Because their self-appointed spokesmen are a gaggle of extremist nutcases whose representativeness is very much in doubt, and whose ideological home is somewhere slightly to the right of Russian Orthodox Patriarch.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.