As of yesterday, the media coverage of the cartoon riots in the Middle East had done a poor job connecting the dots between the violence associated with the cartoons and the efforts of Arab governments to direct attention away from their own failures. Today, a few papers started to report the connections. The Wall Street Journal did some great reporting in this article today (sub. req.):

Frustrated by the Danish government’s response, the [European Committee for Honoring the Prophet] decided after a series of meetings in October and November that “our only option was take our case outside Denmark,” Mr. Abu-Laban says. There was growing interest from Muslim ambassadors in Copenhagen and their home governments, including Egypt.
Mr. Abu-Laban, who grew up in Egypt and was arrested there in the early 1980s after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for his preaching, took charge of writing statements for the group and communicating with Muslim ambassadors. He denies holding extremist views, but acknowledges hosting visits to Denmark by Omar Abdel Rahman, before his arrest in New York, where the blind sheik now is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Mr. Abu-Laban began working closely with Cairo’s embassy in Copenhagen, holding several meetings with Egypt’s ambassador to Denmark, Mona Omar Attia. “Egypt’s embassy played a fundamental role,” he says. Egypt and other Arab regimes saw the furor as a good opportunity “to counteract pressure from the West” and “to show people they are good Muslims,” he says.
Ms. Attia, the ambassador, says she wasn’t motivated by political concerns but by personal outrage. “I was very angry. I was very upset,” she says, describing the cartoons as an unacceptable insult to all Muslims. She acknowledges meeting with the Danish clerics several times but denies coordinating strategy with them. […]
The first delegation left for Cairo in early December. As that nation was about to hold the final round of the first democratic election in modern Egyptian history, the government was battling accusations from some quarters of insufficient piety. Ms. Attia, the ambassador, denies that authorities tried to manipulate the cartoon issue as an electoral ploy.

Yet somehow I just don’t believe that. Maybe it’s the Egyptian government’s long history of using anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiment in its government-controlled media to deflect attention from its own failings. The WSJ has done some great work here, and the NYT touched on this angle in one report today, but overall the involvement of Arab governments remains the under-covered aspect of this story.