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02/11/2006:

"Europe's cartoon battle lines are drawn in shades of grey, not black and white"

It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings' publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama. The Bush-Blair position is a useful antidote to those who claim that fear is stalking the offices of western newspapers, where cowardly executives allegedly shrink from publishing anything that might upset Muslims. Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark's "self-censorship" in the face of Islam. Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.

They will find it hard to claim that the men who sent ground troops into one of the oldest capital cities of the Arab world, and still keep them there on an open-ended basis in spite of opposition from a majority of Iraqis, are afraid to upset Muslims. Nor can one seriously argue that Bush is now trying to appease the Islamic world after "learning a lesson" from Iraq. He continues to inflame many Muslims with his sabre-rattling over Iran.

The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.

Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans.
guardian.co.uk

Oh I very highly doubt it: this is what they call in the biz 'good cop
bad cop.' The essential cluelessness on both sides of the pond is the same.