During this year’s carnival parades in Germany (originally a Roman Catholic tradition), some of the contestants in the float competition decided to depart from the standard bashing of Bush, America, and German politicians, and built a float that has the German Islamic front groups seething: Carnival attracts 3 million in Germany - Muslims offended. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

A Muslim leader criticized a float in the city of Dusseldorf that satirically suggested Islam was not peaceful.

The float carried two identical cartoon-style papier-mache figures, each wearing a suicide-bomber’s belt and carrying a dagger and a pistol. The first was labelled ‘the cliche,’ the second was labelled ‘the reality.’

Both scowling figures were labelled ‘mullahs,’ a term used to describe both Shiite and Sunni clergy. The float was part of a carnival parade watched by more than half a million people in the western city of Dusseldorf.

‘This hasn’t got anything to do with humour,’ said Aiman A Mazyek, general secretary of the National Council of Muslims in Germany. ‘The message it gives me is: ‘We love our prejudices, we’ll stand up for them, even if they are flagrantly untrue.”

However ‘as a born-and-bred Rhinelander, I wouldn’t get too upset about it,’ said Mazyek. ‘I’m sure most of the revellers don’t want to spread anti-Islam cynicism.’

Being the curious sort, I went looking for a photograph of this prejudiced, untrue, seethe-provoking float. Lo and behold, there doesn’t seem to be a single picture of it on the US wires: Yahoo! News Search Results for germany float.

They do have George Bush sniffing the armpit of evil:

And George Bush being spanked by the Statue of Liberty:

And this candygram from fantasyland:

But for some odd reason, the only place I could find a picture of the float that threatens to provoke Islamic violence by suggesting a connection between Islam and violence is on a Dutch blog: Lachen met Moslims.

The mullah on the right is labeled “the cliché,” and the one on the left, “the reality.”

Why do you suppose none of the three major wire services have released this photo?

UPDATE at 2/20/07 9:36:46 am:

Here’s a larger version at Getty Images: Getty Images NewsMaker - Detail View.

It’s from AFP; all those other AFP photos were released, but not this one.

UPDATE at 2/20/07 11:03:26 am:

Outcut TV also has a post on the parade (in German).