Muslim Cartoons and the Upcoming Iran War

I've been struggling to understand the Muslim Cartoon issue, and reading articles and commentary as fast as they come out. Last week I stumbled across this piece in Counterpunch by John Sugg, the editor of Creative Loafing. He notes (highlights are mine)

So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. On a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”';

Suggs goes to explain:

How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism -- designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures -- earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.

Sure. It is just a coincidence that as the US government is preparing for war on Iran, a massive global event occurs that fills westerners with disgust for Muslims takes place, over cartoons that had been published in a minor Danish newspaper six months before. Flemming Rose's interview with Pipes is online at Pipes' website.

These events are orchestrated. For a reason. This is more than a discussion about censorship or liberalism or the Islamic world and intolerance.

UPDATE: WaPo has Flemming Rose's justification for printing the cartoons.

[Iran] [US Foreign Policy] [Daniel Pipes] [Islam] [Muslim cartoons] [US]