A snip from Mick Hartley's lengthy muse on the subject of cartoons:
...The whole thing has been a controversy manufactured by the Islamists, starting with the Danish imams who tirelessly toured the Middle East to whip up the hysteria - adding on the way some particularly offensive cartoons of their own - and continued by Arab regimes only too happy to deflect popular aggression onto Western targets: something they're well practiced at. It's simply not true that Mohammed is never portrayed in Islamic culture, and there's certainly a rich tradition of his portrayal in the West, but, as usual, it's the hard-liners who've set the terms of this debate, claiming to speak for all Muslims - not without opposition in the Muslim world - and being taken at their word by the British establishment...
And TigerHawk points to an op-ed (pay only) by Irshad Manji in the Wall Street Journal. Here's a bit he quotes:
Arab elites love such controversies, for they provide convenient opportunities to channel anger away from local injustices. No wonder President Lahoud of Lebanon insisted that his country "cannot accept any insult to any religion." That is rich.
Tihs controversy is a great lesson in the continuing danger of Fear-based societies, where the highs will always be higher and lows lower as public reaction is bound to be cynically manipulated for nefarious purposes and the power of the great semi-interested, moderate-tending middle is chained and silent. Critics will point out that Western nations also have their problems -- witness the insane protesters in London -- but the danger from numbers is far less, and in any case tends to come from people who's political being was formed in a Fear-based setting.
Again, burning embassies give us an object lesson in the value of the spread of freedom.
I'll admit, one could spend some time musing on how the Western media fits in. As a commenter of Mick's points out:
...the media's refusal to show the cartoons is based solely on fear of Muslim reprisal. They're perfectly happy to inflame Muslim sensibilties with stories of flushed Korans and such as long as the blowback is directed against somebody else.
Some specific reasons why it was manufactured now, when the cartoons were published in October.