Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical journal, was in 2007 the only publication in France to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons. As a result, Charlie Hebdo was then charged with slandering a group on the basis of religion, but was finally acquitted after a two day trial.

Charlie Hebdo today intended to commemorate the Islamic victory in the elections in Tunisia by temporarily renaming itself “Sharia Hebdo” and appointing the Prophet Mohammed “guest editor” and putting his portrait again on the cover.

The “Sharia Hebdo” edition had not even appeared yet, when last night the paper’s Paris offices were fire-bombed and its web-site attacked and taken down.

The bravery and readiness to defend the principle of free speech of the American urban elites was promptly demonstrated by Time Magazine’s Bureau chief, the aptly named Bruce Crumley.

Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?

The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. ..

[Y]eah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the “illegal” bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.

All of which leads inevitably to the reflection that objectionable as the bigoted barbarian fanatics who firebombed Charlie Hebdo are, lickspittle cowards, appeasers, and traitors to their own culture and civilization like the invertebrate Mr. Crumbley are even more of a blight on the face of the planet.

Bugger Islam, and bugger bed-wetting liberalism twice.

He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it. ...

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people. ...

Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Jonah Goldberg examines the liberal notion that you are to blame for people’s deaths if you do something Muslims do not like, like burn a Koran or draw a cartoon image of Mohammed, and Muslims riot and kill someone or get killed.

When Pope Benedict delivered his Regensburg address in 2006, he suggested that Islam had a link to violence. In response, many Muslims rioted. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

When Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was asked in an interview about Koran-burning, he brought up former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous comment that the First Amendment “doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater . . . Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

There are a number of grave problems with the crowded-theater cliche. First, you can—even must—yell “fire” in a crowded theater: It just has to be the truth.

But more to the point, fires are not human beings. Fire has no choice but to burn because that is what fire does. Humans have choices. Yet in this formulation (from which Breyer has somewhat retreated), Muslims are akin to soulless, unthinking flames. Taken seriously, this comparison suggests rational people have every reason to fear Muslims in much the same way they fear fire.

There are complex issues here. But the simple truth is the Islamist extremists who behead and riot do have a choice. They want to murder. What they want is an excuse, and they’ll find one no matter what.

Read the whole thing.

Back on April 20th, when producers censored a portion of a South Park episode featuring the prophet Mohammed following Muslim threats, Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris responded by publishing the above cartoon on her (now vanished) website and declaring May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”

Norris’s comment struck a chord with bloggers and was widely reported, but all the attention she attracted made the cartoonist uneasy. Only a few days later, April 26, Norris was backing off and trying to distance herself from the whole affair.

Crawfishing, of course, did her no good at all, and in June,
Anwar al-Awlaki, our own home-grown jihadi cleric, now broadcasting agitprop and threats on the Internet out of Yemen, placed Molly Norris on a hit list including 8 others guilty of blasphemous caricatures of the prophet as a “prime target” whose “proper abode is hellfire.”

Now Seattle Weekly reports that Norris has gone into hiding.

[Molly Norris], on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI,.. is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

Personally, I think she should just move to red state America where everybody has guns.

The Department of Justice publicly released the indictment of a Pennsylvania woman arrested last October, who had apparently been part of a conspiracy planning to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks.

David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and Michael L. Levy, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, together with Janice K. Fedarcyk, Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI in Philadelphia, today announced the unsealing of an indictment charging Colleen R. LaRose, aka “Fatima LaRose,” aka “Jihad Jane,” with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.

The indictment charges that LaRose (an American citizen born in 1963 who resides in Montgomery County, Pa.) and five unindicted co-conspirators (located in South Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the United States) recruited men on the Internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the Internet who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad.

The indictment further charges that LaRose and her unindicted co-conspirators used the Internet to establish relationships with one another and to communicate regarding their plans, which included martyring themselves, soliciting funds for terrorists, soliciting passports and avoiding travel restrictions (through the collection of passports and through marriage) in order to wage violent jihad. The indictment further charges that LaRose stole another individual’s U.S. passport and transferred or attempted to transfer it in an effort to facilitate an act of international terrorism.

In addition, according to the indictment, LaRose received a direct order to kill a citizen and resident of Sweden, and to do so in a way that would frighten “the whole Kufar [non-believer] world.” The indictment further charges that LaRose agreed to carry out her murder assignment, and that she and her co-conspirators discussed that her appearance and American citizenship would help her blend in while carrying out her plans. According to the indictment, LaRose traveled to Europe and tracked the intended target online in an effort to complete her task.

Jawa Reports has photos and gossipy details on the defendant.

Seven of her associates were arrested in Ireland.

Vilks was targeted for the terrible affront to Islam of drawing the prophet in the form of a rondellhund, a whimsical Swedish street art fad resembling the cows that ornamented the streets of Chicago a few years ago.

An American woman with a mullet who converted to Islam and then conspired to murder a Swedish cartoonist? Sounds like the plot of a new Coen Brothers movie.

10 Things Liberals Like About Rush Limbaugh

Swedish cartoonist Lars Viks targeted, too. (Hat tip to Walter Olson.)

The Telegraph reports that an attempt on the life of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was narrowly prevented.

As usual, when innocent lives are threatened by criminal violence, police response is minutes away.

Danish police have shot a Somali man linked to al-Qaida who tried to enter the home of an artist who drew controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The man, 28, who was armed with an axe and a knife, went to the home of Kurt Westergaard at 10pm local time on Friday, police said.

Police shot him in the leg and arm and he was arrested. The man, who is expected to recover, was later charged with two counts of attempted murder.

Mr Westergaard, 74, was commissioned by the Jyllands-Posten newspaper to produce caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed five years ago, including one which depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban.

He has received several death threats since the cartoon was published, but had spoken recently about trying to live as normal a life as possible at his home in Viby near the western city of Aarhus.

Mr Westergaard was there with a five-year-old granddaughter when the attacker tried to get in.

“I locked myself in our safe room. He tried to smash the entrance door with an axe,” he said.

He said that the assailant shouted “revenge” and “blood” as he tried to enter the bathroom where Mr Westergaard and the child had sought shelter.

“My grandchild did fine,” he said. “It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it.”

Officers arrived two minutes later and tried to arrest the assailant, who wielded an axe at a police officer. One officer then shot the man in a knee and a hand, authorities said. Nielsen said the suspect was admitted to hospital but his life was not in danger.

An oldie but a goodie from Iowahawk, in which the blogosphere’s best satirist takes a stab at imagining the cartoon controversy in a more local context: cartoons blaspheming Vince Lombardi!

Hat tip to Richard Faulkner.

Peter Berkowitz discusses prominent cases in recent years of the response to controversy at Duke, Yale, and Harvard, in each of which instances faculty and administrators failed to defend freedom of thought and expression or members of their own community against the excesses of political correctness.

Professors have a professional interest in—indeed a professional duty to uphold—liberty of thought and discussion. But in recent years, precisely where they should be most engaged and outspoken they have been apathetic and inarticulate.

Consider Yale. On Oct. 1, the university hosted Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. His drawing of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban became the best known of 12 cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. That led to deadly protests throughout the Muslim world. On the same day, at an unrelated event, Yale hosted Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen. Her new book, “The Cartoons that Shook the World,” was subject in August to a last minute prepublication decision by Yale President Richard Levin and Yale University Press to remove not only the 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad, including respected works of art. ...

To be sure, Yale’s censorship—the right word because Yale suppressed content on moral and political grounds—raised difficult questions. Can’t rights, including freedom of speech and press, be limited to accommodate other rights and goods? What if reprinting the cartoons and other depictions gave thugs and extremists a new opportunity to inflame passions and unleash violence? Can’t the consequences of the cartoons’ original publication be understood without reproducing them? Weren’t the cartoons really akin, as Yale Senior Lecturer Charles Hill pointed out in a letter to the Yale Alumni magazine, to the depictions of Jews as grotesque monsters that successive American administrations have sought to persuade Arab newspapers to cease publishing? And isn’t it true, as Mr. Hill also observed, that Yale’s obligation to defend free speech does not oblige it to subsidize gratuitously offensive or intellectually worthless speech?

These are good questions—to which there are good answers.

Rights are subject to limits, but a right as fundamental to the university and the nation as freedom of speech and press should only be limited in cases of imminent danger and not in deference to speculation about possible violence at an indeterminate future date. One can’t properly evaluate Ms. Klausen’s contention that the cartoons were cynically manipulated without assessing with one’s own eyes whether the images passed beyond mockery and ridicule to the direct incitement of violence.

Even if the cartoons exhibited a kinship to anti-Semitic caricatures, it would cut in favor of publication: a scholar would be derelict in his duties if he published a work on anti-Semitic images without including examples. And finally, if Yale chooses to publish a rigorous analysis of the Danish cartoon controversy, which affected the national interest and roiled world affairs, then the university does incur a scholarly obligation to include all the relevant information and evidence including the cartoons at the center, regardless of whether they are in themselves gratuitously offensive and intellectually worthless.

The wonder is that Yale’s censorship has excited so little debate at Yale. The American Association of University Professors condemned Yale for caving in to terrorists’ “anticipated demands.” And a group of distinguished alumni formed the Yale Committee for a Free Press and published a letter protesting Yale’s “surrender to potential unknown billigerents” and calling on the university to correct its error by reprinting Ms. Klausen’s book with the cartoons and other images intact. But the Yale faculty has mostly yawned. Even the famously activist Yale Law School has, according to its director of public affairs, sponsored no programs on censorship and the university.

Alas, there is good reason to suppose that in its complacency about threats to freedom on campus the Yale faculty is typical of faculties at our leading universities. In 2006, even as the police had barely begun their investigation, Duke University President Richard Brodhead lent the prestige of his office to faculty members’ prosecution and conviction in the court of public opinion of three members of the Duke lacrosse team falsely accused of gang raping an African-American exotic dancer. It turned out they were being pursued by a rogue prosecutor. To be sure, it was only a vocal minority at Duke who led the public rush to judgment. But the vast majority of the faculty stood idly by, never rising to defend the presumption of innocence and the requirements of fair process. Perhaps Duke faculty members did not realize or perhaps they did not care that these formal and fundamental protections against the abuse of power belong among the conditions essential to the lively exchange of ideas at the heart of liberal education.

Similarly, in 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers sparked a faculty revolt that ultimately led to his ouster by floating at a closed-door, off-the-record meeting the hypothesis—which he gave reasons for rejecting only a few breaths after posing it—that women were poorly represented among natural science faculties because significantly fewer women than men are born with the extraordinary theoretical intelligence necessary to succeed at the highest scientific levels. Before he was forced to resign, Mr. Summers did his part to set back the cause of unfettered intellectual inquiry by taking the side of his accusers and apologizing repeatedly for having dared to expose an unpopular idea to rational analysis. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, the Harvard faculty could not find a principle worth defending in the controversy over Mr. Summer’s remarks.

As the controversies at Yale, Duke and Harvard captured national attention, professors from other universities haven’t had much to say in defense of liberty of thought and discussion either. This silence represents a collective failure of America’s professors of colossal proportions. What could be a clearer sign of our professors’ loss of understanding of the requirements of liberal education than their failure to defend liberty of thought and discussion where it touches them most directly?

What indeed?

Evan R. Goldstein in Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the infamous behavior of the current Yale Administration which chose to grovel in the direction of bigoted and fanatical primitives out of a classic New England establishment combination of effete cowardice combined with mercenary greed for financial rewards destined to flow from Arab states paying Yale to operate outposts of Western learning in their camel-scented capitals.

They really should have changed Yale’s color from Blue to Chrome Yellow while they were at it.

(Jytte Klaussen, the author of The Cartoons That Shook the World) was informed by John E. Donatich, director of the Yale press, that all illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad would be removed from her forthcoming book out of concern that they might provoke violence. “I threw up my hands,” an obviously incredulous Klausen recalled during a recent interview. Yale’s decision, made public in The New York Times in August, has been heatedly debated. “This misguided action established a dangerous precedent that threatens academic and intellectual freedom around the world,” warned the National Coalition Against Censorship. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, called the press’s action “fundamentally cowardly.” Reza Aslan, a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, withdrew his blurb from the book.

Klausen is plainly exhausted by the controversy. “It has been hard to see the book being sucked into the same polarization that took place around the cartoons.” She does not support Sarah Ruden, a poet and classicist who has previously published with Yale, who has called for academics to boycott the press. The press has already suffered, Klausen says. “Why pile it on?”

In conversation, it is clear that Klausen is relieved, at last, to be discussing the substance of her book, a detectivelike narrative that turns on this question: How did 12 drawings in a provincial daily newspaper provoke an international crisis? ...

when does respect for cultural sensitivities drift into a curb on freedom of speech? What is the proper balance between responsible and free speech? “I don’t think free speech gives you license, particularly not as an academic, to say or print anything you want,” Klausen says. “As academics we have an obligation to speak on the basis of evidence and facts, but with sensitivity to religious precepts. But those precepts—be they Muslim, Christian, or Jewish—can’t dictate what we do.” The removal of the cartoons from her book, she says, violated that commitment to evidence and facts. “Worse,” she adds, “this is historical evidence that has been removed from eyesight.”

The Utrecht public prosecutor’s office announced today that it intends to prosecute the Arab European League (AEL) on hate speech charges under Dutch Law for re-publishing the above cartoon on its website.

When the cartoon first appeared last month, the public prosecutor’s office threatened to charge the group if it did not remove the cartoon. The cartoon was punishable, Dutch prosecutors warned, “because it offends Jews on the basis of their race and/or religion.”

Subsequently, the same prosecutor’s office ruled that the Danish Mohammed cartoons were not offensive to Muslims as a group and were not an incitement to discrimination or violence against them. It declared that the Danish cartoons publication
on Geert Wilders website in 2006 had not violated Dutch law. Nor had the TV programme Nova, which also showed the cartoons.

AEL responded to what it declared to be a double-standard on freedom of expression, and re-posted the Holocaust cartoon.

The Utrecht prosecutor’s office said charge have been filed against AEL for “insulting a group and distributing an insulting image.” The maximum penalty under Dutch Law is a year in prison, but the prosecutor’s office stated that a fine of up to euro4,700 ($6,700) would be a more likely penalty when charges are filed against an organization.

I find it interesting to reflect that long ago, during the period of the European wars of religion, the Dutch port cities used to represent a refuge of tolerance sought by heretics of all descriptions and a publishing center beyond the reach of repressive ecclesiastical authorities. Contemporary political correctness clearly has a longer reach than the Council of Geneva or the Holy Office of Rome. Benedict Spinoza could peacefully grind lenses in Rijnsburg or The Hague, despite having offended the Jewish community with his “abominable heresies and monstrous acts.”

It was touch and go clearly on whether one could publish a cartoon expressing mild derision of the Muslim prophet. There can be no doubt that questioning the Holocaust is an intolerable heresy. Good thing the stake is also politically incorrect.

Christopher Hitchens does not find persuasive the rationale for Yale’s preemptive surrender in removing the Danish Mohammed cartoons, and other images by Dore, Dali, Botticelli, Rodin, &c., from a new Yale University Press book on the Cartoon Jihad allegedly supplied by a panel of “experts.”

We have serious problems with expertise in the elite circles of the contemporary intelligentsia. Its members’ utter and complete lack of both testosterone and common sense tends to preclude the possibility of the combination of mastery of any particular specialized topic with demonstrated skill in the manipulation of words and symbols being associated with sound judgement or manly behavior.

The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press’ surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has “never blinked” in the face of controversy, but “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen’s book, the blood would be on the publisher’s hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press’s public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”

So here’s another depressing thing: Neither the “experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies” who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it’s a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it’s a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won’t wear the veil have “provoked” those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that “logic” as its own.

It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of “the image” at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.

Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who’s to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

Yale Bans Cartoons, August 13

Salvador Dali, The Divine Comedy Suite (Inferno): Mohammed, wood cut, 1952-1964

The New York Times reported one of the most shameful and contemptible events in Yale’s three century long history.

Here is one of the richest and most prestigious universities in the civilized world piously turning its back on the core Western principles of open exchange of ideas and freedom of expression in order to avert the violence of primitive bigots and fanatics in their barbaric homelands far from New Haven.

If a fraudulent “artist” wanted to submerge the most sacred symbol of the very Christianity which founded Yale in a jar of urine, they’d happily display it in the Yale Art Gallery. If some bolshevik crackpot wrote a play lovingly fantasizing about the assassination of President George W. Bush (Yale ‘68), there’d be no problem performing it at the Yale Rep. But derogating anything pertinent to the amour propre of the genuine inferiors of modern European and American civilized humanity is intolerable because it would be violative of the new ultimate and supreme core principle of liberal modernity, the one inevitably trumping any and all other principles and values: ressentiment.

As long as the barbarian comes in the form of the aggrieved Caliban, blaming his condition and violent behavior on the actions and the contempt of the West, there is no length the cowardly intellectual clerisy of today’s establishment will not go to appease him.

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

The book’s author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., reluctantly accepted Yale University Press’s decision not to publish the cartoons. But she was disturbed by the withdrawal of the other representations of Muhammad. All of those images are widely available, Ms. Klausen said by telephone, adding that “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that the incident was misunderstood, so the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.” The book is due out in November.

John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said by telephone that the decision was difficult, but the recommendation to withdraw the images, including the historical ones of Muhammad, was “overwhelming and unanimous.” The cartoons are freely available on the Internet and can be accurately described in words, Mr. Donatich said, so reprinting them could be interpreted easily as gratuitous.

He noted that he had been involved in publishing other controversial books — like “The King Never Smiles” by Paul M. Handley, a recent unauthorized biography of Thailand’s current monarch — and “I’ve never blinked.” But, he said, “when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question.”

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on his Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century

Hat tip to Global-Air.

Osama has a new video in which he accuses coalition forces of deliberately killing women and children (He’d never do that!), but notes that the Danish cartoons were much worse.

Rusty Shackleford has the 5:05 video at the bottom of his article.

Yesterday, as the National Post reports, he was hailed before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission to answer a complaint filed by the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada.

Levant has produced several video statements defending Candanian free speech, which are linked by LGF.

At least 25 of the 200 newspapers carrying Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip Opus, including the Washington Post, the comic strip’s own syndicator (!), refused to carry the last two weekly episodes.

Editor&Publisher reports that the Post’s Sales Manager explained that “some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor.”

But, as the Chicago Tribune makes clear, it doesn’t seem likely that mere mild sexual innuendo caused panicky editors at 25 newspapers to shun the last two episodes.

Some newspaper editors think cartoonist Berkeley Breathed might have crossed a line when he incorporated sexual innuendo into an “Opus” comic strip about a character’s conversion to radical Islam. But it’s not the first strip by the artist to poke fun at religion.

The cartoon ran in the Tribune, but not in The Washington Post, the strip’s home newspaper, or in a couple dozen other papers that pick up “Opus.”

Editors at the Washington Post reportedly showed the strips to Muslim employees, who disapproved of the depiction of the Lola Granola character dressed in traditional Muslim garb, declaring conservative Islamic views and making a sexual innuendo.

But the same care apparently was not taken with any of the previous irreverent cartoons that referenced Lola’s spiritual quest, which included introducing the Amish to nude yoga. The punch line of an Aug. 19 “Opus” poked fun at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

The Weekly Standard wonders:

Why would editors have felt constrained to solicit the views of Muslim staffers?

Were all the Baptists in the Post newsroom consulted about the Jerry Falwell joke? Is “Doonesbury” shown in advance to all the Republicans in the Post newsroom?

6:32 MSNBC video

Islamic-themed comic strips:

26 Aug 07

2 Sep 07

Jerry Falwell-themed comic strip:

19 Aug 07

The same Washington Post which was not afraid to publish leaks disclosing secret National Security operations in time of war behaves like this over… cartoons!

Reporters Without Borders announced

a Paris criminal court’s decision today to clear Philippe Val, the editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. The case was brought by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) and the World Islamic League…

France22 March 2007

Charlie Hebdo editor’s acquittal in Mohammed cartoon case hailed as positive for French society

Reporters Without Borders hailed a Paris criminal court’s decision today to clear Philippe Val, the editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion” by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago. The case was brought by the Paris Grand Mosque, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) and the World Islamic League.

“The court’s verdict accords with the French republic’s values and is good for French society as a whole,” the press freedom organisation said. “We hail the judges’ finding that the limits of free expression were not exceeded in this case. This ruling is a victory for press freedom and in no way is a defeat for a community. We hope it will set a judicial precedent.”

The UOIF announced that it would appeal, but the Paris Grand Mosque said it would not.

The outcome of this key trial for the defence of press freedom follows a similar decision by Danish judges acquitting the editors of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the first newspaper to publish controversial cartoons of Mohammed.

In the French case, the three plaintiffs had demanded 30,000 euros in damages from Charlie Hebdo, while the French public prosecutor’s office had recommended acquittal. Val had additionally faced a possible sentence of six months in prison and a fine of 22,500 euros. As he left the court today, he expressed his satisfaction and confidence in the French judicial system, commenting: “We have been vindicated by the court.”

Val had received strong backing not only from French journalists but also many politicians, including UDF presidential candidate François Bayrou and French Socialist Party leader François Hollande, who voiced their support for the weekly during the two-day trial on 7 and 8 February. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the UMP presidential candidate, had also indicated his support, commenting that he preferred “an excess of cartoons to a lack of cartoons.”

The lawsuit concerned three of the six Mohammed cartoons which the weekly published on 8 February 2006. Two of the three had appeared in Jyllands-Posten in 2005. One of them showed Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb about to explode. The other showed him saying: “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.” The third, which was on the cover, was by French cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut. It showed Mohammed with his head in his hands saying: “It is hard to be loved by idiots.”

Previous posting

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly which was the only publication in France to reprint the Danish Mohammed cartoons, is appearing today before the Correctional Tribunal of Paris facing accusations by Islamic Organisations of France and the Grand Mosque of Paris that reprinting the cartoons was a violation of French laws prohibiting politically incorrect expression.

AP:

Charlie-Hebdo and the publication’s director, Philippe Val, are charged with “publicly slandering a group of people because of their religion.” The charge carries a possible six-month prison sentence and a fine of up to $28,530.

Guardian

New Straits Times

Al Jazeera reports:

In an act of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, French newspaper Libération printed the contested cartoons once more on Wednesday.

“It is not words which wound, or pictures that kill. It is bombs,” the daily said, calling the trial “idiotic”.

Never Yet Melted 8 Feb 2006

In 1972, more than three decades ago, Danish lawyer and part-time politician Mogens Glistrup had an idea that brought him instant fame. To save taxes, he proposed that the Danish army be disbanded and an answering machine be set up in the defense ministry that would play the following message: “We capitulate!” Not only would it save money, Glistrup argued, but it would also save lives in an emergency. On the strength of this “program,” Glistrup’s Progress Party managed to become the second-most powerful political party in the Danish parliament in the 1973 elections.

Glistrup had the right idea, but he was a number of years premature. Now would be the right time to set up his answering machine.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Pim’s Ghost.

The G2 Bulletin, a subscription Intelligence newsletter, is quoted in World Net Daily as reporting that:

A dozen young terrorists have departed Afghanistan, bound first for Iran and then Europe, where their mission will be to hunt down the Danish cartoonists responsible for drawing anti-Muhammad sketches…

The report was passed on by Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who has interviewed al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and who just visited the no-man’s land along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

While there, he was told by Taliban sources in south Waziristan that 12 young men — nine Afghans and three Pakistanis — are on their way to Europe to kill the Danish cartoonists. While some carry Afghan passports and others carry Iranian passports, all will travel through Iran on their way to Europe, he reports.

All 12 have recorded the video messages that will be aired publicly if they hit their targets.

What will Europe do? I suppose they could refuse entry to, or simply intern, all persons bearing Afghani or Iranian passports. It looks like the the twelve Danish artists who drew the generally rather bland Mohammed cartoons will wind up living anonymously, under police security, like Salman Rushdie for years.

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Big Lizards

What provoked all this was a posting on Aaron’s CC cached on Google) responding to some earlier Islamic hacking attacks, derogating the civilization of the Islamic Golden Age, and asserting:

the Muslim world’s contributions to civilization, were entirely derivative, bereft of originality, applying principles derived by Westerners. While script kiddies might have taken down my site earlier this month, they’re no match in the long run against motivation, resources and creativity. Hell, let’s face it, by any quantitative measure, Israel invents more in a month to benefit mankind than Arabs do in a century. OK, that was too generous… in half a milennium.

Stories:

LGF

Michelle Malkin

UPDATE

Also temporarily disabled were:

Big Lizards
Lone Star Times
The Strata-Sphere
Blogs For Bush

I had no idea that so many blogs, some with large readerships, some with small, all used the same hosting service. There is a real vulnerability here.

The sex industry, which is legal in Germany, is anticipating a bonanza of lonely customers from abroad, travelling to attend the World Cup soccer tournament taking place June 9 to July 9. So the Pascha Brothel in Cologne, which boasts of being the largest bordello in Europe and the only business of its kind to offer a money-back guarantee to dissatisfied customers, wanting to welcome customers from all 32 participating countries, placed a 9-story tall advertising poster on its high-rise building, featuring a smiling blonde removing her bikini, above the flags of all 32 countries, captioned with a paraphrased version of the official motto: “The World as a Guest Among Girlfriends.”

Well, the sons of the Prophet were not amused. The BBC reports that Brothel-owner Armid Lobscheid told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper that Muslim groups accused the brothel of insulting Islam:

He said they had accused the brothel of insulting Islam by using the flags.

First there were telephone threats of violence, then about 30 hooded protesters armed with knives and sticks turned up outside Pascha on Friday, the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper reported.

“The situation was explosive,” Mr Lobscheid told the paper.

“Some of the people compared our ad to the Danish Mohammed cartoons,” he said, referring to cartoons which sparked violent protests in several Muslim countries in February.

German brothel-keepers are no more courageous on the average than the management of Borders, of course, so the flags of first Saudi Arabia and later Iran were obligingly blacked out.

Dr. Prof. Matthias Storme Y (M.A.) ‘82,offers very nice example of earlier European treatment of Mohammed. The Church of Our Dear Lady in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels who are treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.
———————————————————Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Certainly, the whole affair raises issues worth debating. Is an ersatz journalist with mainstream media credentials a fair target? What if he’s prominent in some political circles and, by day, a paid representative of a local university? Can he be fired for his private statements? If an anti-Muslim cartoon is drawn in the blogospheric forest and few people read it, does it still offend? Can an alt-media journalist on his way to work for a centrist politician point out conservative Muslim-bashing when he sees it? And, most importantly, isn’t karma a bitch? In blog comment threads, these questions were dealt with in approximately inverse proportion to their importance. So nothing’s been settled, and lots of names were called along the way.

But over the past week, the Scene has learned a few lessons, and like Hobbs, we’ll paint with a broad, provocative brush here. First, bloggers want media attention until they get it. Second, many of them are far more reactive than the angry Muslims we feared would storm our offices after we took Bill’s challenge and published a hateful Mohammed caricature in our newspaper. Third, pissing off bloggers is great for the Scene’s web traffic. And fourth, you can cobble together enough of their rants, under names real and assumed, to form a decently entertaining political notes column. Read to the end, and you’ll even learn that Bill’s landed on his feet.

—————————————-

Hat tip to Michael Silence and Glenn Reynolds.
—————————————-

Original story.

An Italian conservative Catholic magazine, Studi cattolici [Catholic Studies] (Pretty darned conservative, no web page!), informally associated with Opus Dei, published in its March issue a cartoon alluding to Dante’s Divine Comedy Canto XXVIII (which places Mohammed in Hell), in order to make a satirical comment on contemporary Italian politics.

Despite the fact that Mohammed is not even illustrated in the cartoon, its publication produced the now-predictable Islamic howls of indignation, and the equally-predictable Occidental cringing.

Opus Dei’s prelature, represented by Manuel Sanchez Hurtado, resorted to boot-licking:

It is one thing to appreciate Dante’s Divine Comedy and a very different thing to joke about this particular scene in the present climate and in a Catholic magazine,” said that Opus Dei communications director. While the prelature is not directly responsible for Studi Cattolici, he said, the editors responsible had apologized for the illustration and Opus Dei leaders wanted to “unite ourselves to this request for forgiveness.”

Cesare Cavalleri, the editor who published the cartoon, apologized,

Cavalleri was quoted as saying the vignette “was interpreted as being anti-Islam when, if anything, it was a denunciation of a cultural identity crisis in the West,” the Italian news agency ANSA quoted Cavalleri as saying. “In any case, if, contrary to my and the author‘s intentions, someone felt offended in his religious feelings, I willingly apologize as a Christian.”

But some detect a possible note of saracasm in his apologizing, “as a Christian.”

In the characteristically valiant fashion of the MSM, today’s news reports have universally omitted publishing the controversial cartoon.

Associated Press did present a tiny, unintelligible image of the wrong cartoon. Malcolm Moore in the Telegraph mistranslated it, and misidentified the respective speakers.

Michelle Malkin, who is doing her characteristically thorough coverage, asked for a translation, and here it is:

Dante: “There, split in half from head to cheeks, isn’t that Mohammed?”

Virgil (balloon 1): “Yes, he is divided, because he sowed divisions in society.”

Virgil (balloon 2): “And that one there with his pants down, that’s Italian policy towards Islam.”

Nashville, Tennessee’s Bill Hobbs, the Volunteer State’s second best known conservative blogger, lost his job at Belmont University for publishing a cartoon featuring Mohammed, alluding to the Danish cartoons which have created an international uproar.

In February, no doubt at the time Islamic mobs were setting fire to embassies over those cartoons, about the same time I got mad and put up a link to Gustave Doré’s illustration of Mohammed in Hell (see Danish cartoons button in the right column), Bill Hobbs decided to follow Jyllands-Posten’s example and invited readers to “Exercise your right to free expression by drawing cartoons of Islam’s ‘Prophet Mohammed,’ before the West gives in to Islamist intimidation and fear of Islamist violence and makes it illegal to do so.” He provided an inspirational tongue-in-cheek example: a stick figure Mohammed holding a bomb, deliberately captioned in childish letters: “Mohammed Blows.”

Hobbs had a vulnerability, however. He was prominently involved in supporting Republican State Senator Jim Bryson’s gubernatorial capaign, and had created a Bryson for Governor blog. Democrat blogger Mike Kopp saw a way to bash Bryson by going after Hobbs, so last Wednesday, he posted this:

I’ve know Hobbs for many years and while we never see eye to eye on the issues, I’ve generally found him to be fairly reasonable to deal with.

But Hobbs has shown me a darker side to his mind with his insensitive, moronic site.

I have no quarrel with a person’s right to free speech, but as a Christian I believe this kind of expression goes against all the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.

This prompts me to want to ask candidate “man of faith” Jim Bryson if he condones this kind of distasteful insensitivity to people of other faiths; and it also prompts me to want to contact Bob Fisher, the president of Belmont University, to inquire if he too believes this kind of expression is in line with the University’s mission to promote and uphold Christian values.

If Jim Bryson wants to continue to use Hobbs and his blog followers to spread his message, so be it. But if he does, he better be prepared to deal with the political consequences.

And, you know how it works, if a city has colleges, it has commies, and free alternative leftwing weekly papers aimed at young people, featuring the good restaurant and music scene reviews. The Nashville Scene (naturally) has one of those loudmouth leftie political columnists, a jerk named John Spragins, who two days ago decided to pile on, too, climbing atop his portable pulpit, and advising readers loudly that he was holier than Hobbs:

First, let’s sort some things out. For starters, Hobbs has the right to free speech, and Kopp has the right to hold him accountable for that speech. (For that matter, so do Belmont, Bryson and the Nashville Scene.) Hobbs’ stated point—that the media shouldn’t be intimidated into self-censorship by angry mobs of Muslims—is fairly non-controversial. Even those who chose not to publish the original cartoons would agree that violence is an illegitimate means of political expression.

But by deliberately desecrating Islam’s central figure—“the ‘Prophet Mohammed’ ” as Hobbs sneered, using quote marks for sardonic emphasis—he attacked an entire religion, not a group of fanatics who pervert the religion’s teachings. Then he drew him as a bearded stick figure holding a bomb and said he “blows.” It seems bearded Muslim terrorists are the new big-nosed, money-grubbing Jews. The more things change….

Clearly, not much that’s really interesting happens in Nashville, Tennessee.

Roger A. knows all the principals and seems shocked and awed by the job the lefties did on Bill Hobbs.

HJ mourns.

Glenn Reynolds sounds disgusted.

Michelle Malkin thinks the whole thing is “Horrible.”
————————————————————UPDATE

Riehl World View looks at John Spraggins, and finds he is not exactly Mr. Clean on the decorum and civiity front himself. Riehl also identifies exactly where Mike Kopp is coming from:

It should be noted that the individual who first posted on the cartoon in a negative manner, the post that Spragens linked, Mike Kopp, apparently owns the domain for an individual once encouraged to run in the same race as the candidate Hobbs was working for. Quite a coincidence, that. Kopp is a former Gore press secretary and has a long history of work for the Democrat Party.

But first, I’d like to point out that harwellforgovernor.com was registered on September 23, 2005, by Mike Kopp of Nashville, and the domain is reserved for one year from that date. According to a Google search,...

The moral, folks, is that leftist democrat hypocrisy works like a charm on cowardly and conformist university administrators.

Gaius Arbo thinks plain envy was at work here.————————————————————FURTHER UPDATE

Knoxville News Sentinel’s Michael Silence observes that Mike Kopp is being kept busy deleting comments to his blog.

JB comments on Mike Kopp’s “I did it for the children!” post last Friday:

On Friday afternoon, after news had broke that Hobbs would be resigning from Belmont, Kopp broke his silence on the controversial events of the day (note the number of deleted comments):

As I pulled into my multi-racial, multi-cultural subdivision in West Nashville, I drove past a small group of children whom I know to be members of several Muslim neighborhood families playing in a yard up the street from my home. One of the children, a young girl, waved at me and smiled. In an instant it became clear to me why I had written as I did about the blog Mohammed Cartoons.

I called the Tennessean reporter to tell her that had I not pointed out the insensitivity of the blog, I would have had trouble facing my neighbors; the children and their parents who walk our sidewalks each day and call out in friendship at every opportunity. “Shame on me,” I told the reporter, “if I hadn’t taken a stand on this matter.”

Geez, what a hack! Kopp found an offensive cartoon that had never been publicized or viewed, took it out of context and ensured that it was published in the Nashville Scene for anyone to see and has the audacity to claim he “did it for the children!” Any reasonable person can see Kopp’s handiwork for exactly what it is. It was a political hit job designed to hurt Jim Bryson and put a popular conservative blogger in his place.

Phil Bredesen should be mindful of the kind of people he pays to represent his campaign and the tactics they use. Mike Kopp’s disgraceful smear has solidified the support of many Republicans – who were on the fence about Bredesen – behind the candidacy of Jim Bryson. Thanks Kopp.

video

There is some debate on whether or not this story may be a spoof.

Why should I do all all the work of writing this up, and attaching all the links to the major bogs covering all this, when Pajama Media’s editor in Sydney already did?

Egyptian blogger Sand Monkey reports that the Syndicate of Egyptian Cartoonists has organized a response to Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten’s Mohammed cartoons. The results were published in al-Fagr (“the Dawn”), the same newsaper which published the Danish cartoons last October.

More of the new Egyptian cartoons can be seen at Sand Monkey’s blog. They are not very witty, but neither were the Danish cartoons really (though the latter were more colorful, and a bit better drawn). Still, even taking into account the antisemiticism, it is refreshing, and seems a positive development, to see the Islamic world responding cartoon-for-cartoon. not beheading-knife-for-cartoon.