This NYT piece argues that the Danish cartoon imbroglio is but one front in a war between Europe's anti-immigration right and the fundamentalist Muslims in Europe's immigrant community.

An excerpt:

"One extreme triggers the other," said Jonas Gahr Store, Norway's foreign minister, arguing that both sides want to polarize the debate at the expense of the moderate majority. "These issues are dangerous because they give the extremes fertile ground."

How did it begin? Oddly, with a decision by a Danish newspaper to commission, and then print, cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in whatever light cartoonists chose to put him.

The newspaper's culture editor, Fleming Rose, says he intended simply to test cartoonists to see if they were self-censoring their work, out of fear of violence from Islamic radicals. He cited a Danish comedian, who said in an interview that he had no problem urinating on the Bible but that he would not dare do the same to the Koran.

"Some Muslims try to impose their religious taboos in the public domain," said Mr. Rose. "In my book, that's not asking for my respect, it's asking for my submission."

Mr. Rose wrote to the Danish Cartoonist Society, inviting cartoonists to depict their interpretation of the Prophet -- whose likeness many devout Muslims believe should never be depicted. Some refused on the grounds that the exercise was a provocation, but a dozen complied.

Mr. Rose said not all 12 drawings would offend Muslims: one depicted a Danish anti-immigration politician in a police lineup, and another lampooned Mr. Rose as an agent provocateur.

"It wasn't meant to insult or hurt anybody's feelings," Mr. Rose said, drawing a distinction between criticizing religious authority, "which goes all the way back to Voltaire and the tradition of the Enlightenment," and the "far greater offense of denigrating a specific ethnic group."

But this did not take place in a political vacuum. Hostile feelings have been growing between Denmark's immigrants and a government supported by the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has pushed anti-immigrant policies. And stereotyping in cartoons has a notorious history in Europe, where anti-Semitic caricatures fed the Holocaust, just as they feed anti-Israeli propaganda in the Middle East today.

The story says that a group of fundamentalist Muslim clerics lobbied some Muslim countries to demand a meeting with Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. When that didn't happen, they took their show on the road.

The clerics inflamed the response by including in their presentation far more offensive cartoons that never appeared in any newspaper, some depicting Muhammad as a pedophile, a pig or engaged in bestiality.

Now, to this point in my research, I've not seen any other references to such depictions of Muhammad by the cartoonists. Unfortunately, the NYT piece doesn't ask culture editor Fleming Rose if there were such cartoons.

Nor does the article say how the clerics obtained those unpublished cartoons, which is problematic for me.

Here's how the piece ends:

Mr. Rose offered a distinction between respecting other people's faith, which he favors, and obeying someone else's religious taboos, which he said society has no obligation to do.

But whether his exercise had achieved his stated goal -- of forcing citizens to think about their submission to someone else's taboos -- it was clear that it had helped extremists on both sides who would keep Europe and the Muslim world from understanding each other.