Adept at puerile politics

Yet it turns out that no such effort was needed to introduce these particular caricatures to the Middle East.

In October 2005 - one month after the cartoons were initially printed by Jyllands-Posten - Cairo's al Fajar daily ran a straight news article on the Danish drawings affair. And the Egyptian newspaper's story featured 6 of the original 12 sketches, including 2 of those deemed most offensive by Scandinavian Islamic authorities.

But the republication of these cartoons in the heart of the Islamic Middle East passed without discord or disruption.

There was no civil strife in the streets of Cairo: at least not until it could be orchestrated by a travelling troupe of demagogues who were hell bent on inciting a global religious war.

It takes both premeditation and co-ordination to generate such a worldwide wave of violent pandemonium. Dictators like Syria's Bashar Assad and Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenai, must be brought into the loop, and the official apparatus of those police states must be mobilised to the task at hand.

The mobs that ransacked Scandinavian embassies in Damascus and Tehran were clearly operating with the blessing of the local authorities.

What is happening now throughout the Middle East is the oldest story in the Arab political playbook. The despots who rule from Tehran to Tripoli are past masters at using external distractions to deflect attention from domestic oppression and misery.

In the past, popular frustrations have been successfully vented by carefully choreographed hostility towards Israel. And we now see the same technique being applied to Western culture as a whole.

It isn't exactly as if religious bigotry is foreign to the Arab world. A glance at newspaper coverage in Cairo and Gaza reveals Jews are routinely depicted in a manner worthy of the rabid Nazi weekly, Der Sturmer.

From hook-nosed Hebrew conspirators plotting world domination to the medieval blood libel, the Arabic language media resurrect vile ethnic myths and stereotypes of ancient and recent Jewish history.

But the Jews do not respond to such systematic incitement to hatred by rioting in the streets.

The real offence to Arab sensibilities should come, not from Copenhagen but from the heartland of the Middle East where autocrats use and abuse their own people.

It is time for Arab political culture to grow up.