The Prophet Muhammad—“peace be upon him,” as the BBC has sycophantically taken to adding when the name is mentioned in its broadcasts—with a cartoon bomb in his turban? Well, it’s not exactly a side-splitter. Danish humor, I guess. They must be killing themselves in Copenhagen. But then you wouldn’t have thought it particularly controversial to suggest that an awful lot of those who are letting off bombs in the world today, many of whom are blowing themselves up along with them, are doing so in the name of that same gentleman. But so it is, it seems.

Of course, the anti-Danish riots—now there’s a phrase I never thought I’d have occasion to write—in the Islamic world were a put-up job, as was the outrage occasioned by this and some other cartoons in the first place. The dozen drawings, most completely inoffensive, had appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten months ago without exciting comment. It was only when a Danish imam, Ahmed Abu-Laban, took them—together with some much more offensive ones that were not part of the original collection and whose provenance has not been explained—to show around to some of his more prominent fellow members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East that the ball really got rolling.

But if, in most of the places where demonstrations took place, no demonstrations take place without official sanction, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the outrage they manifested wasn’t genuine. In fact, the one thing we know about Islamic