The Globe and Mail interviews Ahmed Akkari, the young Danish Islamic scholar who took some caricatures of the prophet Muhammad to the Middle East -- and inadvertently helped hell break loose.

I offer a bit of analysis.

Some excerpts:

Ahmed Akkari, a young Islamic scholar and Danish activist, was on a mission. Having failed to get the Prime Minister to take action over the cartoons' perceived slight to Islam, he had sought help from esteemed figures in the Muslim world, he says.

Over the next few weeks, he would hand copies of his green booklet to the grand mufti of Egypt, the chief cleric of the Sunni faith, leaders of the Arab League, the top official of the Lebanese Christian church and others.

They stared in amazement at the images in the book, he remembered during a lengthy interview yesterday, and vowed to take action to help him.

"They said to me, 'Do they really say this is the Prophet Mohammed? They must really have no respect for religion up there in Denmark.' And they said they would make it known."

Mr. Akkari now finds himself regretting the results of his brief journey, the somewhat distorted message of which flashed around the Muslim world by Internet, newspaper and text message, and caused millions of Muslims to believe that Denmark and the Nordic countries had become home to blasphemies. ...

... His booklet contained not only the 12 depictions of the Prophet Mohammed that had appeared in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September. He also filled it with hideous, amateur images of the Prophet as a pig, a dog, a woman and a child-sodomizing madman.

Flipping through the book yesterday, he explained that these images had been items of hate mail sent to his colleagues by right-wing extremists who disapproved of their activism. These images, he insistently demonstrated, were separated from the newspaper cartoons by several pages of letters. "How could anyone mistake these for the newspaper images?" he asked. "It cannot be that anyone would make this mistake."

But protesters in Lebanon and elsewhere have cited these images in their actions. So have the organizers of a worldwide boycott campaign against Danish products, which is costing the country's economy.

This is an important story because it helps answer the question of where the extremely offensive cartoons came from -- namely, not the newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

The story points to a certain naivete on the the part of Mr. Akkari. He blends in the truly hateful with the merely offensive and expects people to keep the two separate in their own minds.

In addition, he doesn't seem to realize there are some venomous fundamentalist elements within the Muslim community in Europe that would use virtually any excuse to show how the West hates both Muslims and Islam.

At the time Akkari went overseas, the paper had already apologized for the cartoons but stood behind the decision to publish them.

Denmark's right-leaning prime minister didn't want to get involved, saying this was a freedom-of-the-press issue.

Akkari wanted the paper prosecuted under hate-crimes laws and to have the prime minister meet with the ambassadors of Muslim countries.

With all due respect to Akkari and those who hold his views, mocking a religious figure is not the same as promoting hatred.

It's unfortunate the law of unintended consequences applied in this case.