The Washington Times editorial makes a key point:

The spontaneous appearance over the past few days of dozens of Danish flags ready for the burning raises further questions about where the flags came from.

A lot of this "spontaneity" was clearly staged. The cartoons gained a wider audience when radical Danish clerics toured the Middle East last month, showing the offending cartoons to the heads of several of the major Islamist groups in the region. Just in case the originals weren't offensive enough, the clerics also supplied a few of their own cartoons, ever more inflammatory, and said they sprang from the pens of the infidels. One of the clerics, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Ladan, explained in an interview that the tour was meant to "internationalize this issue." The clerics told their hosts that Muslims do not have the right to build mosques in Denmark, and repeated other ridiculous lies to foment discord and ridicule the Danish government.

The radical clerics in Denmark have succeeded, a fact pundits and analysts on both sides have largely missed. The focus has been on the assault on freedom of expression in the name of religious tolerance, as it should be, but that was not what Abu Ladan and his travelers had in mind when they toured the Middle East. They wanted to create a groundswell of discontent among Muslims in Europe, put pressure on Denmark -- and other nations -- to abide by sharia law and to build a sympathetic base for further terrorist attacks. The placards of British Muslims, demanding more "7/7s," a reference to the London subway bombings on July 7, went straight to the point of the clerics' Middle East tour. This was an exercise in agitprop to further the goals of Islamofascism, and it worked.

Thomas Lifson elaborates on this point in "The cartoon crisis conspiracy." Fred Siegel also draws out the stakes to similar effect in "Dropping the veil." Siegel writes:

To read the New York Times or listen to intimidated European politicians you might think that the current angry demonstrations calling for death to the cartoonists were spontaneous eruption of anger. The demonstration in reaction to the cartoons in September of last year may have been spontaneous. But the campaign in the last two weeks to bully tiny Denmark has been funded by the Saudis and other Arab governments.

Siegel adds:

The Arab world understands Europe’s weaknesses far better than the other way around. Criticism of Islamism is usually described by Muslim spokesmen as "racist" as if religious ideology was a biological given. Even more important, they have learned how to game Western liberalism. When Muslim spokesmen deny the Holocaust, they defend themselves on the grounds that they are only exercising their free speech rights. When they insist that images offensive to Muslims should be barred, they drop the free speech bit and argue on the grounds of multi-cultural sensitivity. The latter argument received strong backing from most of the European left which, looking upon Muslims as the new proletariat, insists that Islamophobia, not Islamofascism, is the great issue of the day.

None of this should be unfamiliar to Americans who’ve seen the same game play out on American college campuses. But what’s happening in Europe is campus political correctness enforced by violence and the threat of war.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried an article by Andrew Higgins with some useful background: "How Muslim clerics stirred world against Denmark." See also the Scotsman article: "The children's author who ignited a worldwide protest."

Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley begins his book The West's Last Chance with a compelling account of a fictional Muslim protest in London over a piece of monumental art; I fell for it completely. It has come to mind several time over the past week. Today Blankley rightly invokes it in his column on the cartoon intifada:

[T]he reaction to the Danish cartoons is merely the latest predictable, intolerant response of radical Islam to any opposition to their view of man and God. (In fact, I did predict a Muslim insurrection against blasphemous European art in the first chapter of my recent book, "The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?").

Those who argue for republication of the Danish cartoons are not "instigating" a clash of civilization. Nor are they pouring gasoline on a fire. Rather, they are defending against the already declared and engaged radical Islamist clash against the Christian, Secular, Jewish, Hindu, Chinese world by expressing solidarity with the firemen.

In this case, the firemen, perhaps surprisingly to some, is the European press. French socialist newspapers, The BBC, and other major secular European media stand shoulder to shoulder with a right-wing Danish newspaper against what they correctly see is an unyielding demand by radical Islam that Europe begin to start living under Sharia law.

Blankley suggests that of the causes of offense there is no end. Those who call for understanding and sensitivity in response to the reaction that has been fabricated around the world do not understand what is happening.