By far the best thing I've read on the spiraling conflagration sparked by Jyllands-Posten's depictions of Mohammed is this article in the English-language version of Der Spiegel.

With Danish flags and effigies of the Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rassmussen being burned across the Middle East and Asia, a lot of carefully-cultivated goodwill in the third world is rapidly evaporating. Setting aside 1% of GNP for foreign aid is apparently not enough to balance out the impact of the twelve political cartoons of the prophet published in a provincial Jutland paper.

Recent developments in the internal Danish political sphere include the exposure of a right-wing Danish People's Party politician for having sent a "Boycot Muslims" text message from her cell phone -- in response to Middle Eastern threats to cease buying any Danish dairy exports. She claims to only have forwarded the message, but it's a curiously Scandinavian twist that politicians actually know how to use SMS.

Rassmussen is unfortunately not the best person to handle the fire-fighting -- he sent Danish troops into Iraq as part of the US invasion. Carl Bildt, former PM of Sweden, would presumably have more credibility on the street due to his long involvement in protecting Bosnian Muslims in the Balkans.

If there's any bright spot in the increasingly dark news about Danish-Arabian relations, it's that this crisis is rapidly becoming a EU-wide problem, rather than something Rassmussen has to suss out himself. With the EU's Gaza embassy surrounded and attacked by angry Palestinians, France and Germany have to lend their weight to whatever eventual solution is found.

One of the insightful parts of the Spiegel article is the research into exactly how this issue became widely-known in the Middle East. Ahmed Akkari, a Danish imam, brought a portfolio of both the JP cartoons as well as other racist drawings with him on a trip to meet religious leaders in Egypt, Saudia Arabia and other countries. His stated goal was to gather advice about how to deal with Danish racism and prejudice against Danish Muslims, but who knows in what context he presented the images and with what explanation. It's pretty easy to find racist imagery on the internet, for whatever racial, religious or class conflict you could imagine. (Before the web, these images probably circulated through xerox machines and faxes.) The intermixing of anti-Muslim hate imagery with the JP cartoons no doubt muddied the waters in the Middle East, and it's hard to believe Akkari spent a great deal of time explaining the gulf between state and press that exists in Europe.

Unfortunately, Akkari, as well as other Muslims in Denmark who share nothing with him except a religion, may now reap the whirlwind. Denmark stands alone in the Scandinavian countries in having voted in a far-right party into seats in parliament. And Rassmussen, the Prime Minister who sent his generals to stand flanking US generals at press conferences during the invasion of Iraq, is the kind of leader which caused Michael Moore to wonder in his most recent book, "Are they part of Scandinavian anymore, anyway?" The young Danes who stand in Copenhagen's central square:

... with a banner saying "Sorry!" are not, apparently, voting in large enough numbers to influence national politics. Whether Danes line up behind that banner, or behind one saying something quite different, remains to be seen.

For a look at the cartoons themselves, you can see a small version of the original page here.