The Danish editor who published the drawings of the prophet Muhammad that have sparked worldwide protests said the furor was deliberately stoked by a group of Danish imams who toured the Middle East with a portfolio that included images never printed in his paper, among them, drawings of the prophet having sex with animals.
Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, said a group of men he called "radical imams" traveled to the Middle East several months after his newspaper's Sept. 30 commentary on self-censorship, which was accompanied by cartoons of Muhammad, "to stir up the crowds by telling lies."
He said the group carried a 45-page portfolio that contained not just the 12 cartoons published in his paper but several more incendiary drawings whose origin was unclear. They included depictions of the prophet with the face of a pig, and having sex with animals and children.
"All of that gratuitous rubbish was trumped around to trigger a campaign of senseless hatred," Rose said.
A member of the imam group dismissed the accusations, saying they had distinguished between the newspaper's pictures and the other drawings, which they took along to Middle Eastern leaders to illustrate the "rampant Islamophobia" in Denmark.
"It is the cartoons from Jyllands-Posten that have made people so angry and nothing else," said Ahmed Akkari, a spokesman for 27 Muslim associations in Denmark, who was part of the delegation. "We went there [to Egypt and Lebanon] because the Danish government turned a deaf ear to our protests."
International terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino, of the Washington, D.C.-based Investigative Project, said he believes the additional drawings "added fuel to the fire."
"The original cartoons were offensive, but these were worse," he said. "It was really nasty stuff."
Vidino, author of the recently published "Al Qaeda in Europe: The New Battleground of International Jihad," said the portfolio itself made no distinctions between the sets of drawings. "They said they made the distinction in their presentations. Did they? That's impossible to know. But I do know that in Arabic chat rooms, people were talking about the Danes showing pictures of the prophet Muhammad as a pig."
Vidino said the group's leader, Ahmed Abu Laban, describes himself as a moderate imam but has past ties to radical Islamists, such as serving as a translator for top al-Qaida aide Ayman al-Zawahri in the early 1990s.
Abu Laban has been heavily criticized in Denmark since telling Danish TV last week that he disapproved of the boycott of Danish products, while being quoted in Arabic media as praising it. "We have clearly noted that in certain situations, some people are speaking with two tongues," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.
This story was supplemented with wire reports.
