Yes - I know what I said but this is significant....

I know that I had said there would be no more cartoon news here but I have now come across an article that sets out exactly how they came into existence. It makes the press freedom angle seem more plausible than the Muslim insult theory.

The global furor over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad can be traced to one day last September when newspaper editor Flemming Rose smelled a good story.
He said he'd read that museums in Sweden and London had recently removed artworks their staff deemed offensive to Muslims. A Danish comedian told him that he felt free to desecrate the Bible but that he'd be afraid to do the same to the Koran. Then Rose read that a Danish children's book author couldn't find illustrators who dared draw Muhammad for a new book on Islam.
Rose, culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, suspected the art world was self-censoring out of fear of Islamic radicals. So he contacted 25 Danish newspaper cartoonists with a challenge: Draw Muhammad as you see him. Twelve responded, and the newspaper printed their submissions, including one that depicted Islam's holiest figure with a bomb in his turban.
"We have a tradition of satire in Denmark," Rose, 47, said in an interview. "We do the same with the royal family, politicians, anyone. In a modern secular society, nobody can impose their religious taboos in the public domain."
At the Islamic Cultural Center in Copenhagen, Ahmed Abu Laban saw the cartoons. "We were astonished and extremely shocked," said Laban, 60. One of Denmark's most prominent Muslim clerics, he said the faith's tradition forbids any depictions of Muhammad. He saw the crude drawings as the latest smear against Muslims in Denmark, a nation whose long history of tolerance has been tested in recent years by rising anti-immigrant sentiment.
Laban immediately called together 11 other Muslim leaders to plan a response. Eliciting no regrets from the newspaper or the Danish government, they sent envoys to the Middle East to seek support there. The chain of events illustrates how, in the current climate of tension between Islam and the West, a small spark, printed on an inside page of a midsize newspaper in a small country, can escalate into an international conflagration.

Here we come to a bit that I personally find very fishy

Government officials and other critics here said Laban's delegations intentionally inflamed Islamic leaders in Egypt and Lebanon by passing off several obscene cartoons of Muhammad as among those published in the newspaper. Laban said those had been sent anonymously to Muslim leaders in Denmark and were shown to the Islamic officials as examples of anti-Muslim feeling in the country. He said no one suggested they had been published in the newspaper.