THE source of the cartoons was on NPR this morning

[underpants]

Audio link below.



Seems that he and his organization put together a pamphlet on these cartoons and some unpublished ones that appeared in threatening letters to Danish Muslims. They sent the pamphlet to scholars and theologians in Egypt and Lebanon. Somehow someone there let them get out and these cartoons that were published in September of last year started all this.

Why Egypt? Apparently there was a fatwa issued in 1940 or there abouts concerning film making and the use of Muhammed's image.

It was a telephone interview and his English was broken to a degree. The NPR interviewing was very hostile towards him.

At least that was his side of the story

Muslim Society Official Explains Mission Against Cartoons
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5195798

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. interesting information

wonder if those who said that these cartoons were innocuous-just satire-would still say so if this allegation is indeed true-that they were parts of threatening letters. I have had a feeling that there was something nefarious about them and that they were reprinted to fulfill someone's agenda (and it could be either al Qaeda or neocons, I don't know which).

[underpants]

2. Whose agenda indeed

Who knows?

Like I said this was his side of the story. I don't know who "got them out there" ...the Saudis?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. The ones sent as threatening letters were in addition to the newspaper

ones. If you've seen the online reproductions of the extra cartoons, it's easy to tell the difference - they are either bad photocopies of bad photoshop work, or very simple line drawings that anyone could do, and would never come from a professional cartoonist. The problem is that these (extra-?)offensive ones (I think one depicts Mohammed as a pig, and another accuse him of paedophilia) may have been presented in the Middle East as being published by the newspaper too. This interviewee says that they think it was clear what the origins of the worst cartoons was.