Did the Danish clerics organize the fraud themselves, or were they duped? And how clear were they during their tour that the three most offensive cartoons had never been published?

Arabic speakers who have seen the original dossier tell met that it did make it clear that the three "extra" cartoons where never published.

Update: reading Wikipedia I found an online link - no longer working - to the/an Arabic dossier on the cartoons written by the Denmark group of Imams. Having given it a speed read, it appeared to me that while the dossier was written post-facto to their official meetings, its Arabic text did clearly indicate the incendiary 'extra cartoons' were not published, but were ones received by certain unidentified protest leaders, post their public protests in Denmark.

Link to Aqoul

For everyone's edification, here are links to the three offensive cartoons:

http://ekstrabladet.dk/grafik/nettet/tegninger40.jpg
http://ekstrabladet.dk/grafik/nettet/tegninger39.jpg
http://ekstrabladet.dk/grafik/nettet/tegninger38.jpg

Dunno about you, but I think you'd have to be pretty stupid, ignorant, and brainwashed to think that any of these actually ran in a Danish newspaper.

Why do I find it perfectly natural that the French would hold a televised pig squealing contest?

I heard Akkari on the radio this morning. He explained the "extra" cartoons were enclosed in threatening letters to members of the Danish Muslim community. I'm not sure which is more threating - pigs or the French - but thought I'd pass along at least the semblence of clarification from the Danish Muslims. In the same breath, Akkari refused to take any blame for the riots and violence by comparing himself to Henry Ford. The inane analogy was that we don't blame Ford for making the car that some idiot teenager drives into a wall while drunk so we shouldn't blame his organization - to any extent whatsoever - for the mayhem that has ensued.

Also - Mike - have you ever visited the southern U.S.?

If it's a sin against Allah for an infidel to create cartoons that blaspheme Muhammad, it must be ten times worse for a Muslim cleric to do such a thing.

...threatening letters. Would not bet my money on that. (Conspiracy theory ahead) I am not a graphologist, but a student who had a chance to attend very interesting lecture two years ago - a part of it was about the fact that whatever alphabet you learn to write the first influences the way you write in all the other alphabets you later learn. Hence you can identify, if sometimes with difficulty, that an individual learned to write Cyrillic or Arabic before they learned to write Latin.

Such individuals often never receive any instruction in writing in the "new" alphabet, and so they are:
1. Drawing the letters and not writing them
2. Maintaining the habits they have acquired when learning their first alphabet. -- eg. the letters have their normal shapes but look as though the have been written backwards (someone has started to write the letter from the wrong end)

Now look closely at the writing on the caricature that shows Mo as a pedophile, and ask yourself doesn't it look a bit strange?

http://ekstrabladet.dk/grafik/nettet/tegninger40.jpg

/English is not my native language -- there probably are at least a few mistakes in the text/

You don't make the pigs squeal. It's a contest among humans to see who can best squeal like a pig. Known to occur at rural festivals in my state, like this one:

http://www.cajuncountry.org/boucherie/

or this one:

http://www.laswinefestival.com/index.html (warning: embedded audio)