The Photoshop-savvy experts in the Farkosphere weigh in on the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006.

(Title inspired by Tim Blair.)

Update: More equally offensive cartoons here; meanwhile, Eugene Volokh puts it all into perspective:

So I guess it's not just that we aren't supposed to draw pictures of Mohammed as terrorist, or of Mohammed at all; we aren't even supposed to draw pictures that are obviously not of Mohammed, and that are meant to mock the inability to draw pictures of Mohammed.

Well, I have to admit: The folks who are offended by this have a First Amendment right to be offended. They should feel entirely free to be offended.

The rest of us should feel entirely free, as a matter of civility as well as of law, to say: Your decision to be offended by this particular cartoon gives you no rights (again, as a matter of civility as well as of law) to tell us to stop printing it.

More on the underlying conceptual issue — the difficult but necessary distinction between (more or less) reasonable taking of offense and unreasonable taking of offense — later; I also hope then to talk in some measure about the distinction between this cartoon and others that I do think can reasonably be found to be offensive, and that probably shouldn't (as a matter of civility) have been published in the first instance, though it is proper to publish them now in order to explain the controversy. For now, it seems to me that this incident does plenty to illustrate the danger of the "it's wrong to publish any cartoons that offend people" attitude.

As Jim Geragthy writes:

Notwithstanding the fine efforts of my colleagues and others, I’ve grown a bit tired of diagnosing liberal bias in the media. The media is what it is. Clearly they don't care if conservatives find 20 factual errors, omissions, half-truths and unfair slants a day; if they did care, they would try to fix these mistakes. (And they wouldn't dress like this.) But in this story, the media (with notable exceptions) has proven itself to be worse than useless in covering the news; they have made an effort to make these cartoons seem unimaginably, unprintably taboo (instead of letting readers decide this for themselves) and they have covered up the degree to which threats and intimidation are repressing free discussion of ideas in non-Muslim countries. That is the story.