Whether you take the recently published cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad as idolatry and blasphemy or free speech and defiance, there is a larger context mobilizing the madness.

"Islam" and "the West" are becoming trapped in the stories they tell about each other. The West is a hopeless bigot and hypocrite; Islam is an intolerant religion that legitimizes extremism.

If you tell a lie enough times, it eventually becomes the truth and as such, frames the way you see the world.

There is no clash of civilizations, just a clash of narratives that sustains bias and ignorance. The real cartoon that we should all criticize is the ignorance embedded within "Western" and "Islamic" narratives about each other.

These misperceptions are being used by an increasingly fearful cabal of puppet masters seeking to hold onto power as pressure mounts for democratic reform. In the Islamic world, as in the United States, political leaders have a well-documented history of abusing religion for political gain.

In the current situation, think of it as a "rally around the Koran" effect. Autocratic leaders strategically ignore, even enable, protests that distance public attention away from the decrepit state of their regimes and, even better, implicate "the West" as the single source of all of society's woes.

An Egyptian government-owned newspaper recently ran an editorial claiming that the cartoons reflect a conspiracy against Islam and Muslims. In Syria, where public assembly is by no means free, the protests could well have been orchestrated to send a clear message to Washington: If you want democracy and regime change, here is what you are going to get.

There is no better release valve to the social unrest building beneath the surface of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world and beyond than to invoke the West as the enemy at the gates.

What started as a highly provocative cartoon in very poor taste has turned unwittingly into a symbol manipulated by puppet masters seeking to tell a tale of the rising West seeking to destroy Islam.

Repressive elites who run the majority of the Islamic world want nothing more than to show that Western values such as democracy and free speech are incompatible with Islam. They want to emphasize a story of Western domination, conspiracy and hypocrisy that legitimates their rule.

The more we insist on seeing the growing crisis as a wave of ignorance, not as the actions of politically mobilized mobs, so much the better for the puppet masters abusing Islam.

To stop this madness, cooler heads have to prevail.

In "the West," we must resist the temptation to see all Islam as extremist and somehow antidemocratic. Rather, we must be wise to the puppet masters that have stripped a religion advocating social justice of its emancipating potential to maintain their grip. Apologies are free. Why not offer them while reserving your right to free speech and asking the more important question: Why are citizens allowed to protest cartoons, but not allowed to protest for free and fair elections?

The blame game recurrent in Western and Islamic narratives is contagious. Narratives of victimization are used by the puppet masters to legitimize what is viewed as a historical struggle against the West. The West dismisses Muslims as polemical and emotional. Both narratives are retrospective as well as ideologically loaded and intellectually weak.

The road to peace and cross-cultural understanding requires a prospective posture, a new story not easily hijacked by puppet masters.