A pig in a poke!

Oink. Click. Bang: Jacques Barrot at his town's annual pig-squealing competition.

This is not a picture of the Prophet wearing a fake pig's snout ... it's just a man in a his town's annual pig-squealing competition.

WHEN Frenchman Jacques Barrot strapped on a fake pig snout at his town's annual pig-squealing competition last August, he little knew he was about to make the Middle East explode.

So he oinked, grunted and squealed away in his remote Pyrenees village of Trie-sur-Baise with such carefree delight that an Associated Press photographer snapped the main picture on this page.

And that's all it took. Oink. Click. BANG.

By December, Denmark's leading imams were circulating a murky black-and-white facsimile of this very same picture among some of the Middle East's most influential preachers and radicals, only claiming it showed not an amateur pig squealer, but the Prophet with a pig snout.

Here, they raged, was one more blasphemous illustration perpetrated by Muslim-hating Danes. Punish them!

The rest is history – along with torched Danish embassies and terrified Danish cartoonists under police guard.

So study this picture and learn two things from it.

First, the violent protests this past week against allegedly blasphemous Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were largely manufactured by extremists who must not be allowed to so curb our freedom of speech.

Second, if a few newspapers and many internet blogs had not dared to publish the cartoons, despite the intimidation, you and I would not now know how trumped-up this fury has been.

Free speech is still safer than censorship, even now. Maybe the Herald Sun and so many other newspapers in the West made a mistake, after all, in not also publishing the cartoons, hoping as I did, too, to stop more people from getting hurt.

Another thing Barrot didn't know as he squealed in August was that over in Denmark, the Jyllands-Posten newspaper had discovered that the author of a children's book on Mohammed could not find an illustrator who dared draw the Prophet, since devout Muslims believe portraying him is sinful.

So the paper decided to test how scared cartoonists were of offending the three per cent of Danes, who are now Muslim, and asked a bunch of them for their own drawings of Mohammed.

H ERE'S another thing you probably won't know, since newspapers won't show you the 12 cartoons Jyllands-Posten finally published. Although papers such as The Age have justified their censorship – and hence the rioters – by dismissing the cartoons as just "stereotypical smears", half are, in fact, most certainly not.

Look them up on the internet. You'll see they include one simply of a bearded man leading a donkey, another accusing the Jyllands-Posten of a "PR stunt", and a third of a schoolboy named Mohammed, who points to a blackboard on which is written in Arabic letters, "Jyllands-Posten journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs."

Yes, there was also the now notorious illustration of Mohammed, or not, wearing a bomb for a turban – an image which the recent violence may seem to justify.

But any reasonable reader seeing them must surely realise that a Muslim driven to mayhem and murder by such mild stuff is either mad or very, very eager to take offence. Here's one more way our self-censorship has protected the zealots behind this week's orgy of hate.

I'm sure plenty of Muslims would agree with me, and here is proof provided by yet another blogger, this one from Egypt: some of the cartoons were published in an Egyptian weekly newspaper, al Fagr, last October, during Ramadan no less, without inspiring any Muslims to reach for their guns or incinerate things Danish.

I T SEEMS Denmark's more extreme imams must also have felt the cartoons weren't really enough to set the world on fire, or at least scorch a Danish embassy.

So, after failing to get the Danish Government to ban the right to mock Islam, a delegation from 27 local Islamic groups, led by a Palestinian with links to jihadist groups, set off in December to the Middle East to "internationalise the issue", and this time took a little extra petrol for the fire.

They had with them a dossier that included not just the 12 newspaper cartoons, but three more they'd mysteriously found – crude pictures from who knows where of a dog raping a praying Muslim and of a fierce Mohammed labelled "pedophile", as well as a badly blurred photocopy of the photograph of Barrot oinking in his fake snout.

The dossier, handed to influential Islamic leaders such as Syria's top Sunni cleric of Syria, sure worked well, at least for the Danish imams, if not for their fellow Danes. And none of the pictures worked better than that of Barrot.

Soon even the BBC reported that the racist Danes had even published a cartoon of the Prophet with a pig snout, and interviewed an angry imam to confirm it.

Our own SBS repeated this hot falsehood, so far had it spread. Naturally, it didn't show the picture, for fear of offending Muslims.

Thankfully, the internet has a lot of sassy blogs that did. Within days the picture had been identified for what it truly was, and the forgery was exposed. Lies die when speech is free. Of course, it took more than this one picture, doctored by hands unknown, to cause riots in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Iran.

It helped that the Syrian regime, widely condemned for assassinating a former Lebanese prime minister last year, seems to have orchestrated the worst violence last weekend, in which the Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut were torched.

But again, the cartoons apparently weren't considered quite anger-making enough, and the bussed-in Islamist protesters in Beirut were put in the proper burning mood with phone-texted claims that Denmark was burning copies of the Koran.

Iran's extremist leaders, who are fighting off European attempts to wind back its nuclear program, are also suspected of organising riots, while the pro-Iranian protesters in the Gaza Strip seem astonishingly well equipped with Danish flags for burning in front of the world's TV cameras.

Still, I don't deny many moderate Muslims were honestly offended to see the Prophet drawn or mocked, just as Christians would be offended by a painting now hanging in Hobart's Red Wall Gallery that shows Jesus mobbed by gays, penis rampant, having "cop-this" sex.

But do they really demand that their taboo on drawing Mohammed apply also to non-Muslims – or else? Must we also then obey the Muslim taboo on statues or unveiled women? Must we likewise all observe the Catholic taboo on abortion? The Jewish taboo on pork?

I doubt that most Muslims here do indeed demand any of this, or that they can't handle free speech.

I saw no riots here when Brisbane's Courier Mail, at least, ran one of the Danish cartoons last week, just as I saw no riots in Egypt last year when the cartoons were run there. I take heart that many of the rioters overseas had to wait to be given orders and fed lies to start waving guns and burning things.

But so many of us in the media have censored ourselves because we, instead, believed the worst. "I'm reluctant even to raise this as an issue, for fear someone will set fire to the building," said Sydney ABC radio host Virginia Trioli yesterday, maybe only half in jest.

Maybe she's right.

But what a shame we gave in to such fears and to the Muslim extremists – most of them overseas – who try so hard to create them.

To have published the cartoons would have been a sign of faith in the Muslims of Australia and a stand for the freedom to speak that so many Muslims overseas so desperately need.

A ND do we dare seem so timid in defence of a freedom that is one of our strongest defences against tyranny anywhere?

Heavens, without that freedom, there would be even some today who'd still think Jacques Barrot really is the Prophet, and not just an oinky boy.