Tonight the BBC admitted that it has misinformed the international community by telling the world that one of the Danish Muhammad cartoons was a depiction of a pigsnouted Muhammad. The BBC website says:

Twelve cartoons were originally published by Jyllands-Posten. None showed the Prophet with the face of a pig. Yet such a portrayal has circulated in the Middle East (The BBC was caught out and for a time showed film of this in Gaza without realizing it was not one of the 12).

This picture, a fuzzy grey photocopy, can now be traced back (suspicion having been confirmed by an admission) to a delegation of Danish Muslim leaders who went to the Middle East in November to publicise the cartoons. The visit was organised by Abu Laban, a leading Muslim figure in Denmark.

Radical Danish imams have deliberately incited hatred against Denmark, the country that had hospitably welcomed them in. To this end, while on a visit to Arab countries last month, they added three false, extremely offensive Muhammad “cartoons” to the twelve relatively mild ones published by Jyllands-Posten last September [see the latter here, halfway down the page].

One of the three additional cartoons [we linked to them in this article], which the imams distributed on a faxed image of appalling quality, was said to be a depiction of Muhammad with a pigsnout. When the Danish press discovered the three false so-called Danish cartoons, the imams refused to say where they had got them. They claimed, however, that the false cartoons were genuinely Danish and had been added to “give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims.”

An article by Hjörtur Gudmundsson, with Alexandra Colen on Al-Guardian

Norway has a far-left government. Since it came to power last October it has grovelled at the feet of extremist Muslims, even considering a consumer boycott of Israel in order to please the islamofascists. The Norwegian government apologized immediately when some of its newspapers reprinted the Danish Muhammad cartoons. This did not prompt the Muslim extremists to treat Oslo any differently than Copenhagen, however. Last week both the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus were torched and ransacked.

It is easy to terrorise people. Just tell them that you will kill them and most people tend to shut up. Sometimes it does not work. This is the case with people who have made the motto of the great state of New Hampshire – “Live Free or die” – their own.

“Terrorism only works when people agree to live in fear,” a Brussels Journal reader wrote to me last week. She is not entirely right. Terrorists have a fall-back strategy when dealing with brave people who value freedom above their own lives. The terrorists just threaten to kill others. Indeed, it is one thing for the morally upright to stand for their own principles and be prepared to die for them, but quite another to realize that others will have to die for them. Many heroic people are tender-hearted, but the terrorists are neither. The real martyr is prepared to die so that others may live free, but not to let others die so that he may live free.

The Cartoon Affair is putting the Belgian authorities in a pickle. On Friday one of its citizens, the Arab immigrant Dyab Abu Jahjah, who lives in Brussels, decided to put a daily cartoon on the website of his organization, the Arab European League.

“After the lectures that Arabs and Muslims received from Europeans on Freedom of Speech and on Tolerance […] AEL decided to enter the cartoon business and to use our right to artistic expression. […] If it is the time to break Taboos and cross all the red lines, we certainly do not want to stay behind,” he wrote. According to Mr Jahjah he has the right to show abusive cartoons if Western papers have the right to show cartoons that are considered abusive by Muslims whose faith forbids the mere depiction of the prophet Muhammad.

Do not think that by now you have heard all that there is to say about the “Danish cartoon” crisis. Last September, a Danish paper noticed that some cartoonists were frightened to depict Near Eastern topics. They seem to have sensed that being funny leads to serious trouble. So the paper made some effort to get such material. The result was twelve drawings [see them here, halfway down the page].

Yesterday the newly established network of moderate Danish Muslims urged Danish imams, who insist Muslims are being treated badly in Denmark, to move to other countries with societies more in harmony with their own view on the world. “If these imams think it is so terrible to live in Denmark, then why do they remain here?” Naser Khader, the leader of the network and a member of the Danish Parliament for the Social Liberal Party (Radikale), said in an interview with the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten.

“After all no one is forcing them to [live in Denmark]. They can always move to one of the countries in the Middle East which are based on the Muslim values they insist on living by. It seems that their loyalty is mainly to countries such as Saudi Arabia, so I think they should move there. I am tired of hearing them complain about the situation in this country which has given them shelter, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and tons of opportunities for their children. If they cannot be loyal to the values of this country they should leave and by that do the majority of Danish Muslims a big favour. The imams should stop critizising the cartoons and instead critizise the terrorists that cut the throats of innocent hostages in the name of Allah and therefore abuse Islam. But on such occasions we never hear a word from them. Hence, they are hypocrites.”

Today the Danish and Norwegian Embassies were trashed in Syria. The police looked on and did nothing. We have been here before. In 1938, Cardinal Innitzer realising his epic mistake in welcoming the Anschluss of Austria, preached a sermon in St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, "There is just one Fuehrer: Jesus Christ." His palace was trashed by the Nazis with the police slow, indifferent or looking on. The scene is dramatised in the famous film "The Shoes of the Fisherman".

A few years ago, I met a member of the Catholic Youth who participated in this Mass. On his way home, he greeted someone with "Long Live Our Archbishop" to show he was not a Nazi but a Christian and in consequence he spent the next six years in a concentration camp.

All the more sad then that the Vatican has followed the British Foreign Secretary in appeasing the critics of the publication of the cartoons.

For four months this website has been one of the few places (apart from the Danish media, of course) where information could be found on the cartoon affair. Today the story is all over the global mainstream media (MSM). Hence there is no need for us to repeat what has been mentioned elsewhere. Our readers probably already know that the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus have been set on fire, that the U.S. and British governments are pleased that their newspapers do not have the guts of some European ones, and that the venerable BBC – never hesitating to offend prudish Christians – found itself in a “dilemma” when it had to decide whether or not to show prudish Muslims twelve, mostly inoffensive cartoons [see them here, halfway down the page] – so inoffensive in fact that alienated Danish Muslim fanatics had to add three truly offensive cartoons (of their own making?) to deliberately incite Islamic hatred against Denmark.

Long lives cause us to have held views that are, in retrospect, nonsense. If your career enabled you to spread your ideas, these stumbles are recorded. A mishap because it takes some skill and cheek to pretend that one stood for the opposite of what became, as time passed, an embarrassment. If you have, at the time of the creation of the original imbecility, not been taken seriously, then this “for instant forgetting” feature of your labors makes the cover up easy. That done, you can start out fresh with a corrected past along a track that leads to recognition for wisdom. Another thing you can do is to publicize your error and let all participate in your rewarding learning experience.