aimed at protecting religious sensibilities will be thwarted because websites are often hosted anonymously and thus extremely difficult to shut down.

The self-appointed defenders of Islamic honor may seek redress or revenge by threatening artists and publishers, but thanks to the combined effects of television and the Internet, the main outcome of their efforts has been a quantum leap in the dissemination of the images pious Muslims find most offensive. By drawing attention to them the militants become accessories to the blasphemies they ostensibly seek to repress.

This comes as no surprise in an era of religious militancy in which the charge of blasphemy is used as a means of political arousal rather than a legal resource for defending the sacred. In Pakistan Salman Taseer, governor of the Punjab region,by one with an ultra-conservative Salafist background in Saudi Arabia, produced no results in Denmark, where freedom of speech is regarded as a fundamental right. The affair escalated after Muslim governments and inter-governmental organizations, whose legitimacy depends on being seen to protect the rights of Muslims, became involved.

The Danish imams took the offending images to Cairo and other Middle East capitals. The dossier included an image of Muhammad as a pedophile downloaded from a Christian evangelical website and a picture of a man wearing a pig-faced mask taken at a French food festival with no Islamic connections, neither of which had been published by Jyllands-Posten. The dossier was circulated by the Arab League, and at a special meeting in Mecca of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—an umbrella