..."Boycott" actually understates the case. In the past week alone, crowds of angry Muslims in several Arab countries burned the Danish flag, a mob attacked European Union offices in Gaza and at least two Danes were beaten in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador from Denmark; Libya closed its embassy, and Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Sudan lodged official protests. A meeting of Arab interior ministers in Tunis demanded that Denmark punish the "authors" of the offense. Danish products were taken off the shelves in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain and other countries, forcing one Danish dairy firm to lay off 800 workers. The European Union trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, struck back with a threat to haul the Saudis before the World Trade Organization. Muslim states replied by submitting a complaint to the United Nations. At midweek the dispute was growing into a full-scale global confrontation between Islam and the West...

...Jyllands-Posten will never win any awards for good taste. Several years ago, during a petition campaign against anti-Israel bias in the press, the paper saw fit to publish a letter from a Dane who tried to discredit the petition by counting its "Jewish names." (Of course he got it wrong, targeting Vikings named Weber and missing Jews named Mallow.)

This time, the newspaper actually apologized for its unintended insult to Muslims — but not for publishing the cartoons, citing the inalienable right of news organizations to free expression.

The Danish government took the same tack. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen took strong exception to the content of the cartoons but reiterated the right of the press to free expression, however ill advised.

But the furor has not died down. The 55-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference declared this week that Denmark's refusal to censor its newspapers was, oddly, "an affront to free expression." Abu Bashar, a local Danish imam who is a chaplain at Nyborg State Prison, told the BBC — falsely — that the cartoons showed Muhammad with a pig's nose and ears. Two Danish Protestant bishops replied that the burning of the Danish flag, which has a cross as its pattern, was a desecration of Christianity.

Danish intellectuals have offered a variety of proposals to de-escalate the crisis. A lecturer at Syddansk University's Middle East Institute, Helle Lykke Nielsen, proposed that the prime minister and foreign minister travel the Arab states on an apology tour. (Not likely; several Arab governments already have warned the two to stay away.) Aarhus University professor Mehdi Mozaffari counseled the opposite: "Keep cool. Once Fogh [Rasmussen] has apologized, the next thing will be [a demand for] apologies from the queen and the parliament."...

...Danes themselves seem shocked. They are, after all, citizens of a country that has opened its doors to tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in recent decades. They have been generous in their support, monetary and political, for the Palestinian cause. Danish public debate, strongly pro-Israel a generation ago, has followed the general European shift toward the Palestinians. Just days before the Palestinian election, Denmark's Channel 2 Television rebroadcast a 2002 documentary on the "Jenin massacre," reviving the now-discredited slur that Israel perpetrated a mass killing in the West Bank city. The film was a tendentious mélange of anti-Israel propaganda that somehow never mentioned the U.N. investigation showing the "massacre" to be a fabrication.

Then again, the same Channel 2 broadcast a program this week on the 1969 American moon landing. This gave equal time to crackpots who say that the whole thing was faked. Perhaps nothing should be surprising in a country that has as its national hero a teller of fairy-tales, Hans Christian Andersen...

...In the face of continual lecturing from high-minded liberals who blame it all on Danish racism, a public backlash has arisen. The satirical cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are merely one example.

More soberly, observers compare the Muslim immigration to the earlier immigration of Jews fleeing communist Poland in the late 1960s. The Jews, critics note, all have integrated and given their children Danish citizenship. Many Muslims have done neither...