The Qatar Emir, who owns Al Jazeera helps to spread it.
February 09, 2006
The cartoon intifada, continued
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/013089.php
In *Rent-a-riot ABCs,* Emir Taheri shows how *the whole rigmarole was launched by Sunni-Salafi [Wahhabi] groups in Europe and Asia, with Ahmadinejad and his Syrian vassal, President Bashar al-Assad, belatedly playing catch-up.* Taheri writes:
The [traveling group of Danish Muslim militants] found a more sympathetic audience in Qatar — where the satellite-TV channel Al Jazeera (owned by the emir) specializes in inciting Muslims against the West and democracy in general. The channel*s chief Islamist televangelist, Yussuf al-Qaradawi (an Egyptian preacher who is also a friend of Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London), was all too keen to issue a "fatwa" to light the fuse. He then mobilized his network of Muslim Brotherhood militants in Europe to attack the cartoons and claim, falsely, that images were not allowed in Islam and that the Danish paper had violated "an absolute principle of The Only True Faith.*
Thus the call for Jihad received its supposed *theological* green light. (Ironically, the section of the brotherhood headed by al-Qaradawi is financed by the European Union as a non-governmental organization.)
As the first rent-a-mob crowds appeared on global TV screens, Ahmadinejad realized that here was a cow worth milking.
For Denmark is set to assume the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council — at the very time that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to refer Iran to the Security Council and demand sanctions. What better, for Tehran*s purposes, than to portray Denmark as *an enemy of Islam* and mobilize Muslim sympathy against the Security Council?
MEMRI has just released a dispatch on al-Qaradawi:
In a February 3, 2006 Friday sermon, Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, who is head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars (IAMS), and the spiritual guide of many other Islamist organizations across the world (including the Muslim Brotherhood), exhorted worshippers to show rage to the world over the Danish paper Jylland Posten's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon was aired on Qatar TV on February 3, 2006.
Read MEMRI's translation of excerpts of the sermon here.
Austin Bay begins his analysis of the cartoon intifada with Ayatollah Khomeni*s condemnation of The Satanic Verses and concludes that the uproar over the cartoons results from *information warfare.*
Minneapolis Star Tribune metro columnist Katherine Kersten covers the local angles on the cartoons. Kersten writes:
[M]any newspapers[] insist that the cartoons violate their standards. The Star Tribune described them as *purposefully sacrilegious* and has declined to reprint them. Many Christian readers will be watching to see if standards differ the next time a cartoonist turns his sights on evangelical Christians or the Catholic Church.
Let's just say that the appearance of Kersten*s column in the Star Tribune is the paper*s gesture toward the free-speech aspect of the cartoon intifada.
Finally, reader Paul Hornsleth, *a grandson of Grenå (in Jyland, of course),* alerts us to the English-language international version of the Jyllands-Posten .
[Peace and democracy are the arch enemy of any Emir*s absolute rule. Planned mass demonstrations that fuel hatred to destabilize Afghanistan and Iraq are a logical weapon for their purpose.
Silence and more troops are our best means to advance peace and freedom.
Time for crybabies who shout freedom of speech at any price to stop pouting like spoiled brats and stop feeding the Jihadist fatwa frenzy. TG]
