When the cartoons satirizing the prophet Mohammed were published in a Danish newspaper and the Muslim community acted with outrage, we took notice. But was the outrage of the Muslim community genuine, or was it a staged attempt to feed the media examples of Islamic "persecution" to justify to the Western world the motivation of an Islamic suicide bomber, which is, for the most part, wholly incomprehensible to us?

The fact is, I would be willing to wager a fair sum that not one individual reading this had ever read that particular newspaper, let alone the cartoons in question. Scandinavian culture is not one with which we are intimately familiar, and I would wager an equally fair sum that less than 50% of you could locate Denmark on a map (at least, before the whole thing began). And I would be willing to go even further and wager that most of the "irate" Muslim clerics who fueled the rioting were well aware of the obscurity of the source.

But the source, however, obscure, gave them a reason to hate us. Like the football coach who scans periodicals for motivational materials for their bulletin boards, these clerics didn't need a reason to hate us. They needed something to motivate their FOLLOWERS to do so, as the decline in suicide bombings outside Iraq and Afghanistan would seem to indicate that most Islamic extremist youth have written off suicide bombing as more or less "a bloody stupid thing to do!" And they needed a reason to rally to the press about the hostility of Americans towards their culture even though, ironically, Americans were not only innocent of involvement in this particular episode, but in fact had, for the large part, declined to publish the cartoons.

The cartoons were, then, to Islamofascists operating outside the war zone, a reason to remain relevant.

As many Muslim writers have themselves acknowledged, representations of the prophet Mohammed are nothing new even within their culture. The view that Mohammed should not be portrayed in portraits or drawings is a minority view, even among practitioners of their faith. Their outrage would be understandable if they were equally outraged by mosques and artwork that portrayed this individual; the lack of outrage would force me, at least, to conclude that their outrage was, indeed, something else; in my view, one of the most creative and elaborately staged PR stunts of all time.