Anti-Cartoon Islamist Protests Not Spontaneous, Part of a Conspiracy, Former Spokesperson Claims

Spontaneous protests over a depiction of the
prophet Mohammed which led to attacks against multiple embassies
weren’t actually spontaneous and its organizers were intent on
escalating the situation and introducing violence according to the
former spokesperson of a working group of imams who coordinated the
response to a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons of Mohammed in
2005.
Freedom House reports:

[As Ahmed Akkari] explains in his book [My Farewell to
Islamism] and a number of interviews he has given since last
summer, the protests and mayhem were not spontaneous reactions from
the Muslim community. Instead they were produced by a calculated
conspiracy between a group of Danish imams and ambassadors from
various Muslim countries, who decided not only to appeal to
influential Muslim states and clerics in order to put pressure on
Denmark, but also to call on brute force from terrorist
organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. The latter alliance
probably led directly to the destruction of the embassies in Beirut
and Damascus…

What is most surprising—and chilling—in Akkari’s book is how
willing the Danish Islamists were to escalate the situation, with
no qualms about the possibility that it could result in violence.
They deliberately played a double game with the Danish and
international community, pretending to work for peace and
reconciliation while covertly taking actions that could only lead
to more confrontations. For the imams, a “clash of civilizations”
was something to be cherished, not avoided, even if the violence
became far more extreme than they had expected.

Our own Matt Welch wrote the Los Angeles Times
editorial on the cartoon controversy, something he discussed
on
this blog in 2010, when outrage over the depiction of
Mohammed—something prohibited in certain hadiths, or
sayings of Mohammed, but not in the Quran, Islam’s holy book,
itself—came to the U.S. over the animated TV show South
Park’s attempt to depict Mohammed in a parody. Reason
hosted Everybody
Draw Mohammed Day after the cartoonist who first proposed it
backed down because of threats of violence. Check out the winners
here. As Nick Gillespie noted
at the time, some of the foulest images of Mohammed used to
stir up outrage in the Middle East over the Danish cartoons were
actually created by the imams themselves.