Peter Brookes, award-winning Times Cartoonist, discusses the 12 Danish cartoons, first published by a newspaper in September, that have sparked a week of protests, flag-burnings and death threats across the Muslim world

"I only saw the drawings yesterday. This week I was working on Iran and oil and the 100th British death in Iraq, which were much more important to me. But this escalated yesterday and I saw them. My first reaction, I have to say, was what feeble cartoons.

"Perhaps I don't understand Danish humour but there was only one out of the 12 - where Muhammad's turban seems to be a bomb - that seemed to have any meaning.

"But even that one is a poor cartoon. It's ambivalent. You can read it one of two ways: either terrorism is using the cloak of Islam, is dressing itself as Muhammad, or that Muhammad himself is a terrorist. I hate that ambivalence in a cartoon, not knowing quite what the message is. We could be misreading the intentions of the artist entirely.

"There is an awful duality about cartoonists: on the one hand, we feel we must be able to depict anything, we must be free. So as a rule, I try not to be too sensitive about these things - and all cartoonists are guilty of doing things when we have no idea what the reaction is going to be.

"Last year, for instance, when the horse Best Mate died on the same day as David Blunkett resigned, I combined the two, and had no idea I would get hundreds of letters of complaint - all from horse lovers, of course, no one wrote to defend Blunkett.

"And yet, as a cartoonist, I think there has to be a purpose. I can't see any reason for these images, they just seem gratuitous. They're meaningless. Depicting Islam, there is no need to show the Prophet.

"It looks like the artists just didn't think it through. And yet, they were asked to do it precisely because an author couldn't find an illustrator who would portray Muhammad. They must have known it was a provocation, they should have been able to foresee something of the reaction after the Dutch experience of the Theo Van Gogh film, and the Satanic Verses.

"Of course now there's so much happening, everything is moving so fast, that this looks like it will all go on and on. And, ironically, we will have to do cartoons about it."