Radical and anti western voices in Islamic communities gained authority and legitimacy as a result of the newspapers' actions  The publication of the cartoons empowered the radical fringes of many Muslim populations, by enabling them to point to the cartoons as tangible evidence of an anti-Muslim bias and anti-Muslim agenda in the West. [i] For instance, in Pakistan, these were used against the president, General Pervez Musharraf, who was perceived as being too closely aligned with the United States. Religious leaders who wanted to make the case that Denmark was deliberately offensive and a hostile environment for Muslims were able to conflate popular knowledge about the cartoon controversy with other incidents (some of them not even in Denmark) and sway support to their anti-ecumenical causes. [ii]  This set back reasonable discourse in Muslim communities about how best to integrate with the West, and ultimately resulted in the weakening of internal forces that encourage acceptance of Western culture. Such a reversal for westernising forces is likely the opposite of what the newspaper would have wanted for the Muslim world.  [i] Witte, Griff, ‘Opportunists Make Use of Cartoon Protests’, The Washington Post, 9 February 2006,   [ii] ‘Background: Muhammad cartoons controversy’, EuropeNews,