Lorenzo Vidino at The Counterterrorism Blog follows up on his report about how a delegation of Danish imams led by Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban disseminated fake anti-Muslim cartoons and attributed them to the Jyllands-Posten to stir up Islamist rage:
Last Friday the CT Blog revealed how a delegation of Danish Muslims, led by Copenhagen imam Abu Laban, toured the Middle East in December and showed fabricated cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a very offensive fashion, even though the pictures had never appeared on Jyllands Posten.The controversy has now exploded in Denmark. Friday night Danish public television, DR, ran two interesting stories about Abu Laban, the man who organized the delegation's trip to the Middle East. While the first profiled him, showing his extensive links to the Egyptian group Gamaa Islamiya, the second showed his double-talk. Abu Laban, in fact, was first shown speaking on Danish television condemning the boycott of Danish goods (in English), then shown interviewed on al Jazeera, cheerfully commenting on the effectiveness of the boycott (in Arabic).
The Counterterrorism Blog has also acquired and translated the lie-filled pamphlet spread by the Danish imams here. (.pdf file)
Here are some of the fake cartoons:
Jim Hoft has much more on Abu Laban, including a video link to Fox News Channel reporter Jonathan Hunt's interview with the terror-sympathizing Laban and this partial transcript:
Imam Ahmad Abu Laban: I mean just to put the face of Muhammad in an ugly fearful way and to put a bomb in his turban, it makes no sense at all for Muslims to digest.Jonathon Hunt: After the publication the Imam and others toured the Middle East showing the cartoons but adding three more new ones that were far more offensive than anything the paper published. He (Imam Ahmad Abu Laban) told us they were from threatening letters but promising to give us copies of those letters, he never did.
[If the extra cartoons were meant to fan the flames, it worked...]
...Imam Ahmad Abu Laban: I demand them within their abilities and competence and within the concept of dynamism of liberalism to create to fashion a new set of rules...
Jonathon Hunt: So, you want a new set of rules for the way Western Europe lives?
Imam Ahmad Abu Laban: Yes.
In other words, this was indeed a campaign, planned by important members of the Islamic world’s power structure, intended to force Denmark to comply with Sharia requirements. A new norm, that a western nation would conform to Sharia regardless of its free exression tradition, would be on the way to being established. Let a few more small nations succumb and someday a United States Supreme Court Justice might cite such behavior as a precedent in a decision.