Well, this could be interesting:

The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has defended a controversial storyline in the comedy cartoon which sees Homer Simpson accuse his Muslim neighbours of terrorism.

In a forthcoming episode of the long-running show, dad Homer Simpson convinces friends that a Middle Eastern family are plotting to blow up a shopping mall but is proved wrong when it turns out the family's father, Amid, works in demolition.

When the Simpson family have their Muslim neighbours over for dinner, Homer shows his ignorance of the Muslim faith calling Allah "Oliver" and holy book The Koran "The Corona".

A spokesperson for Britain's The Islamic Cultural Centre + The London Central Mosque has commented on the episode, telling U.K. newspaper the Daily Star, "I hope Muslims take no notice of the show."

But Groening has come out in defence of the plot, saying, "Cartoons deal in stereotypes. We try to be sensitive."

You do? Well, perhaps when there's the possibility that one of your targets might actually fight back.

No sign of Jay Sherman or Bart Simpson (though I think we know where Homer stands), but Debbie Schlussel spots one of the world's biggest cartoon heroes in the tank for the world's biggest celebrity. No word yet on whether they'll be teaming up for a sequel to this Very Special Issue of Spider-Man.

Back in 2004, Power Line's John Hinderaker wrote that comic books were "a medium in which the liberals will have a hard time competing", but the left's Long March Through The Institutions beginning in the 1960s and '70s also included a stop there, alas.

News you can use from Tim Blair:

If, on May 14, 1979*, you'd asked yourself, "How long must I wait until a cartoon cat uses the phrase 'terrified asexual forcemeat?'", the answer is 10,693 days.

* I think all of us were asking this question in 1979. Precise date selected at random.

And while such brilliant phrasing isn't a part of "one of the best opening paragraphs ever written", it'll do until the next one comes along.

Update: More meaty, beaty, big & bouncy fun from the cartoon kingdom:

The initial seeming near-blackout on the John Edwards scandal in the overculture notwithstanding, the American media aren't the only ones with gaping memory holes: Canada's CBC News profiles Syed Soharwardy, with nary a mention of this minor bit of unpleasantness.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Related: Ezra Levant asks, "Is turn-around fair game?"

This doesn't surprise me in the least: "Clerics Who Started Cartoon Jihad Never Saw The Drawings".

Father Andrea Santoro could not be reached for comment.

News from the cartoon kingdom, as Berke Breathed's "Opus" cartoon gets censored for exactly the reason you'd suspect.

As does....The Dreaded Ball of Blasphemy!

Dilbert checks in on the War On Terror.

Johnny Hart, the artist behind the long-running cartoon "B.C." passed away today. Ed Morrissey has a warm encomium to Hart, whose cartoon was a favorite of mine, as well as my late father:

It seems especially fitting that Hart went to his Lord on Easter, and passed away at the storyboard. May the Lord accept Hart with open arms. Godspeed, Johnny, and thank you.

Incidentally, as I wrote in 2005, academia is working hard to ensure future generations won't know what the cartoon's initials stood for.

I missed this when it first ran, but it's a nifty piece of video journalism about an increasingly rare newspaper editor--a brave one:

Flemming Rose is an author and the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. He is the man principally responsible for the publication of the notorious Mohammed cartoons in that paper last year. On a recent visit to Washington DC, he spoke with Pajamas Media Washington editor Richard Miniter about the reality behind that controversy and its implications for Europe today.

If you missed it as well, click in and watch.

The Great Cartoon Wars of 2006 open up a new front.

Update: But we can all breathe easier now--the UN is on the case!

Back in February, at the peak of the Great Cartoon Riots of 2006, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Once again, the message is that if you blow things up, or even look as if you might, we'll be nice to you. And once again, I note that this is a very unwise message to send.

In an article by Cathy Seipp celebrating the tenth anniversary of a show that's a riot of a cartoon, South Park's producers echo Glenn's instapoint:

Their philosophical position about the Mohammed cartoon is that a free society shouldn’t be cowed by threats from Islamofascists. “If you’re saying this is the one thing we can’t do — besides Tom Cruise — because they’re threatening violence,” said Parker, “Well, then, I guess that’s what everyone should do. If the Catholics don’t want us ripping on Jesus anymore, then they should just threaten violence. That’s why it’s such a slippery slope and such a dangerous path to go down.”

It looks like the dangerous path to the slippery slope is gradually being trodden: Back in 2004, Christianity Today headlined a story, "Nigerian Christians Attack Muslims, Kill Dozens". More recently in Indonesia, "Christians attack Muslims after executions". And in a complete Muggeridge's Law moment, the fellow who hijacked a Turkish Airlines 737 yesterday claims to be a Christian "seeking asylum because he fears persecution in his Muslim homeland after his conversion to Christianity", according to the AP.

On the infamous page 152 of Mark Steyn's new America Alone book, Steyn writes, "A world without order eventually liberates all restraints". He adds, "There will be plenty of non-state actors on the non-Islamic side. In the end, the victims of the Islamic contagion will include many, many Muslims".

If you observe carefully enough, that backlash may have already started.

Incidentally, I'll have a podcast interview with Steyn online soon. Watch this space for details.

Putting the P.C. back into PC video! Hey, remember all the talk from starry-eyed pundits who predicted Internet video would be free from the same deadly-dull uniformity that has crippled the television networks? Dream on, dream on...

(Incidentally, I wonder how many people in YouTube's management had to scramble for a dictionary or Google to figure out what the heck the word "dhimmi" means, after watching this video.)

Update: More video-dhimmitudery spotted here.

The New York Times, a newspaper that within the space of a year hired the photographer who created the infamous "Piss Christ" monstrosity andcompared a Christmas movie to Triumph of the Will feels that it can tell the Pope what to say. And as Allahpundit writes:

From the miserable bastards who not only wouldn’t publish the Mohammed cartoons, but had the titanium balls to illustrate an article about the ensuing jihad with Chris Ofili’s manure Mary.

What is it with the Times and bodily functions, anyhow?

Last year, Glenn Reynolds wrote, "it's surprising the extent to which people who routinely make the Halliburton and chickenhawk slurs seem to require much greater delicacy from others". The Times is the paper of record for what Barack Obama recently dubbed "the party of reaction". So I guess its not surprising the amount of delicacy they demand from the Pope.

But why would a leftwing newspaper written largely by atheists and agnostics want to lecture two of the world's dominant religions, in the first place?

Last year during Newsweek's "Koran In The Can" invention, I wrote:

So how 'bout it, MSM? We now know how ardently you'll defend a religion which is practiced by about three million Americans according to Daniel Pipes, and roughly double that from other sources. Ready to start defending the Judeo-Christian faiths practiced by--or at a bare minimum, respected by--the other 290 million people in this country?

To paraphrase the Times' editorial, the world listens carefully to the words of any newspaper. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. It needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology for trampling Christianty, demonstrating that words can also heal.

But needless to say, the world isn't holding its breath.

While Borders was quick to ban little known secular humanist-oriented publication Free Inquiry in March when it ran The Cartoons That Dare Not Show Their Face, it apparently has no problem carrying the latest issue of liberal stalwart Harper's, which has the same cartoons in it.

Now that these cartoons are in Borders' stores, will the riots that Borders claimed they feared back in March promptly ensue? And if so, can Harper's editor Lewis Lapham use his famous time machine to clean up the mess retroactively?

Fire up the Tardis, Lew!

Of course, it's worth noting that Robert Bidinotto's The New Individualist beat both magazines to the punch; hopefully Bidinotto will have some thoughts on Border's recent flip-flop.

Update: Robert's posted his thoughts:

Borders could have climbed one rung out of hell, in my estimation, had the company publicly acknowledged something to the following effect: "We over-reacted in March to security concerns in our decision not to carry Free Inquiry. We apologize to that magazine, and to those customers who were inconvenienced by our decision. We realize and affirm the importance of standing up for fundamental rights to free expression. Therefore, we will not make the same mistake in the case of Harper's, whose June issue we are carrying on our newsstands."

Such crow-eating might regain the company a small measure of respect and credibility: after all, it's the least they owe to Free Inquiry.

Indeed, to coin an adverb.

TigerHawk writes:

I don't blame Comedy Central, or Border's Books, or the world's media organizations, for refusing to depict Mohammed out of fear of retaliation. Their job is not to defend freedom of speech, but to earn profits for their stockholders. Acting as a fiduciary, I would make the same decision. But let us not tolerate these same organizations claiming that they also support freedom of speech. They are lying when they say they do, because in order to defend freedom of speech, you have to be willing to protect speech against the inevitable threat of violence.

But watch both of these organizations quickly return to patting themselves on the back for how much they do support freedom of speech, and how hip and transgressive they are--in exactly the same way that movie industry superstars believe they're on the cutting edge of controversy as well.

In early March, Jim Geraghty wrote that America had reached was in its post-tipping point phase:

In the USA Today poll, when asked, “Which comes closer to your view about Arab and Muslim countries that are allies of the United States?” 45 percent of respondents said, “trust the same as any other ally”; 51 percent said they trust these countries “less than other allies.”

That’s a remarkably honest poll result. Let’s face it, Americans have been told since kindergarten not to judge ethnic and religious groups differently from one another; now slightly more than half are willing to come out and say, “you know, I just don’t trust those guys as much as I trust others.”

Welcome to Post-Tipping Point politics. There is no upside to doing the right thing – which is to emphasize, as one blogger put it, that there is a difference between Dubai and Damascus. There is tremendous political upside to doing the wrong thing, boldly declaring, “I don’t care what the Muslim world thinks, I’m not allowing any Arab country running ports here in America! I don’t care how much President Bush claims these guys are our allies, I don’t trust them, and I’m not going to hand them the keys to the vital entries to our country!”

A month and a half later--as both the Cartoon Wars and Iran's attempt to build The Bomb have both progressed that much further--even worse polling numbers are spotted by CBS:

Although Americans believe they are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

Charles Johnson helpfully rewrites that lead for the Tiffany Network:

Just a second; let’s fix that first paragraph.

(LGF) Americans are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, and a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

That’s better.

CBS seems to be constitutionally incapable of considering that there might be unfavorable views because Americans are better informed, not “although” they “believe” they’re better informed. Mainstream media has been cramming multiculturalist doublethink about Islam down the public’s throat ever since September 11, and it’s pretty revealing that in spite of this ongoing effort we still see a growing negative perception.

And it's further proof that the MSM has lost control over any sort of national dialogue.

Update: Of course, having lost control over a monopoly, a feeling of smug superiority and ideological purity can emerge, because it helps avoid the introspection required to understand your current predicament:

What's with the "although"? ...that one word implies that the writer is morally superior/smarter than 4 out of 5 Americans. Which of course they do.

And CBS has certainly demonstrated that arrogance numerous times in recent years, of course.

If it actually airs, that is--The Officers' Club writes that South Park is about to air those cartoons, if Viacom doesn't get the willies first:

From what I could gather from the cliffhanger ending [of this week's episode], South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone have forced Comedy Central to stand at the same crossroads that hundreds of newspapers and periodicals across America stood at not a month ago. Next week they will guest star Mohammed in all of his animated glory, and they have let Muslims know in advance that it's a-coming.

Comedy Central has a choice. They can either stand by their longtime stars in Parker and Stone, or succumb to cheap threats from petty thugs. Should Comedy Central make a decision endorsed by the First Amendment, I will be glued to my tv next Wednesday at 10pm.

Over to you, Sumner Redstone!

Because the controversy over the Mohammad cartoons doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon (just ask Borders), I decided to create a new category to tie all of our related posts on the topic together.

Eventually, I'll go back and include other cartoon-related topics in this category, including coverage of the South Park TV series and Brian Anderson's related South Park Conservatives book. But for now, as you'll see if you scroll to the beginning of the category, it begins, appropriate enough, with A Word From Piglet...

Charles Johnson writes, "Irony, Thy Name is Borders":

In an advertisement for a book festival called Wordstock, sponsored in part by Borders Books, here’s your moment of exquisitely timed irony: Ad sponsored by Borders Books: “Never met a banned author I didn’t like.”

And you go right on believing that, old sport!

Robert Bidinotto channels the ghost of Gary Cooper and observes:

Thanks to these traitors to the First Amendment, America is fast becoming Will Kane's Hadleyville. They more and more resemble the cringing, "civilized" town fathers in that corrupt fictional crossroads: prostrate in spineless supplication before the town bullies, projecting shameful resentment against the Will Kanes whose bravery shows them up for the cowards that they are.

As I wrote yesterday, "pretty much all of the talk from the anointed (to borrow from a book title by Thomas Sowell) on the importance of epatering the bourgeois, shocking the masses, breaking down barriers, et al, has been shown to be hypocritical."

Avant-garde artists used to pride themselves on being fearless. But that was back when their primary targets simply turned the other cheek. We've already seen how quickly Hollywood caves to an enemy that doesn't; now we're seeing a host of other institutions join them.

In Dhimmi Watch, D.C. Watson writes, "If CAIR were anything close to a legitimate civil rights group operating in the United States, they would be encouraging two things":

1) That Borders and Waldenbooks feel free to carry any publication of their choosing, no matter the content, or whom it may offend.

2) That all Muslims living in America should respect free speech and expression, as it is guaranteed to all Americans by the U.S. Constitution, and that there should never be the slightest hint of retaliation against anyone for exercising this Constitutional right.

Instead, Watson notes, "Since Islam is a 'religion of peace,' shouldn't CAIR be adding Borders and Waldenbooks to its long list of 'Islamophobes'?:

From the column: Beth Bingham, Borders spokesperson: "For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority."

Has CAIR viewed this as some sort of a victory? In truth, it is a defeat.

It is a defeat for this organization and others like it because Borders and Waldenbooks didn't choose not to carry "Free Inquiry" out of respect for Islam, but out of the fear of repercussions being carried out by Muslims against the bookstores' customers, property, and personnel.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Don't miss the open--and entirely fictitious and satirical--letter "from Gregory P Josefowicz CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, Borders Books to Charles Johnson, Director, Pajamas Media, CEO Little Green Foosballs, Rock 'N' Roller in the Free World, Stealth Cyclist."

Here's more from the Blogosphere on Borders' decision not to sell magazines with Motoons. First up is Robert Bidinotto, publisher of the subscription-only magazine The New Individualist, which is running the most well-known cartoon on its cover, who has an open letter to Borders on his blog. Here's an excerpt:

Let me be clear: I did not publish the cartoon to offend Muslims. I did so as a profound matter of principle: to stand up to those who are trying to annihilate our First Amendment rights. I did so because here, in America, nobody can be permitted to get away with coercion and intimidation against anyone's freedom to write and speak and publish. I did so because I learned many years ago, as a child on school playgrounds, that when you surrender to bullies, you grant them dictatorial power over your life.

By its public declaration of pre-emptive surrender, Borders has given the bullies of our age a clear message: Your intimidation works. Your bullying works. Your coercion works. Your terrorist threats work.

Borders has set a morally irresponsible and frighteningly dangerous precedent. It has told fanatics everywhere that all they need to do in order to obliterate First Amendment rights is to growl menacingly -- at which point a leading bookstore chain in America will clear its shelves of anything that could possibly offend the thug of the moment.

Having now encouraged the use of violence and intimidation, which magazine or book are you next prepared to expunge from your stores? Will you remove books about abortion, for fear of provoking some "right to life" fanatic? Will you eliminate Jewish magazines or black publications, for fear of upsetting neo-Nazis and skinheads? Scientology has been known to intimidate critics; are you about to bow to their demands for "proper" treatment in magazines and books, by eliminating all critical material? Or if some investigative journalist probes organized crime, will you hide his work in the back room, for fear of retaliation from the Mob?

You have given a sorry example of where such capitulation begins. But where does it end?

As Tim Blair notes, there was a time, not so long ago, that Borders attempted to shine a light on the dangers of banning books:

In 2001, Borders hosted events to highlight the tragedy of banned books:

Borders Books, Music, and Cafe, 4030 Commonwealth Ave., hosted a reading in honor of banned books week. This was the first in a series of three readings in the Eau Claire area to increase awareness about banned books. Nine area residents read excerpts from their favorite banned books.

One of the readers, English lecturer Elizabeth Preston, said at the time: “Where is the line between banning a book and banning a group of people from reading? Who is in charge of drawing that line?” Beats me. Ask Borders.

Meanwhile, one of Borders' employees writes that the company has a unique policy when it comes to how and where and where certain books are displayed in their stores:

I was shifting rows of books in our religion section and it happened to be that all of our Koran books (a section on its own) ended up on the bottom shelf. The next day I was informed by my General Manager that it is Borders policy as a whole (not my particular store) that due to complaints in the past from Muslim customers, we are not allowed to put our copies of the Koran on any shelf other than the top.

When I heard of this I became so infuriated that the company I work for (and I do love working for it) has caved in to Islamic pressure and is still continuing to do so. I love my job and my company but it does deeply disturb me to see what is happening to it.

As Charles Johnson adds:

This has nothing to do with sensitivity; it’s all about pure, simple fear. If a Christian group complained to Borders about Bibles being placed on a bottom shelf, they would be laughed out of the room. But when Muslims do the same thing, Borders institutes a store-wide policy. The difference? The implicit or explicit threats of violence that accompany the latter.

In yesterday’s statement about their craven refusal to support free speech, a Borders spokesperson admitted it:

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

Jim Geraghty spots a PBS article on the eeeevils of Wal-Mart that now seems quaint in its naivety:

And when Sheryl Crow released her self-titled album, Wal-Mart objected to the lyric, "Watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores." When Crow would not change the verse, the retailer refused to carry the album. This type of censorship has become so common that it is often regarded as simply another stage of editing. Record labels are now acting preemptively, issuing two versions of the same album for their big name artists. Less well-known bands, however, are forced to offer "sanitized" albums out of the gate.

Well, pretty much all of the talk from the anointed (to borrow from a book title by Thomas Sowell) on the importance of epatering the bourgeois, shocking the masses, breaking down barriers, et al, has been shown to be hypocritical. As the Professor writes:

If you don't like ideas, don't bother arguing with them. Just threaten to kill people. They'll back down. Or at least their booksellers, universities, and governments will. How long before other groups take this lesson to heart?

Advancing toward fascism, one cowardly institution at a time.

Well, we'll always have the Internet.

At least for the moment.

Update: Steve Green gets analytical with it: "President Bush isn’t a fascist, and I can prove it":

We’ve seen what American bookstores and publications and universities do when confronted with real fascists: they knuckle under. You might not be able to find those Danish cartoons anyplace respectable, but you’ll sure find lots of anti-Bush stuff.

Ipso facto, America is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.

As Steve writes, "Don't Confuse Them With Logic".

The cartoon wars slog onwards: Yesterday we noted that an Ayn Rand-oriented magazine has apparently become the first publication in the US to run that cartoon on its cover.

Today, Charles Johnson notes that Borders and Waldenbooks have banned a magazine which merely features the cartoons on the inside of the publication:

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

Well, now we know why Rolling Stone photographed Kanye West as Christ instead of Muhammad on its cover a couple of months ago. As Glenn Reynolds wrote in early February:

I'm sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That's a very bad incentive structure, but it's the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.

And the Borders/Waldenbooks chain have fallen right in line, proving Jim Geraghty's Tipping Point theory once again.

Update: Welcome VodkaPundit and Robert Bidinotto readers! Please look around; we're sure you'll find more than a few things you'll enjoy.

Another Update (8:21 PM, 3/30/06): More on this topic, here.

The Ayn Rand-oriented magazine, The New Individualist apparently has become the first publication in the US to run that cartoon on its cover.

With mass media having been replaced by so many niche publications and targeted magazines and newspapers, it's increasingly much more difficult to keep information bottled up. While most of the major TV networks and newspapers have chosen (for whatever reason) not to run the cartoons, there are simply too many sources (both on dead tree and online) to keep them under entirely under wraps.

(Via Stephen Green.)

Isaac Hayes quits South Park after the show boldly goes where no one else in Hollywood has gone before: it made fun of the world's second-most prickly religion:

"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," the 63-year-old soul singer and outspoken Scientologist said.

"Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored," he continued. "As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices."

"South Park" co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply in an interview with The Associated Press Monday, saying, "This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology... He has no problem - and he's cashed plenty of checks - with our show making fun of Christians."

Last November, "South Park" targeted the Church of Scientology and its celebrity followers, including actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta, in a top-rated episode called "Trapped in the Closet." In the episode, Stan, one of the show's four mischievous fourth graders, is hailed as a reluctant savior by Scientology leaders, while a cartoon Cruise locks himself in a closet and won't come out.

Stone told The AP he and co-creator Trey Parker "never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin."

Xenuphobia claims yet another victim. Will cartoons of Eric Cartman be burned in response?

Update: Ed Morrissey stirs the pot: "It seems that Chef can't take what he dishes out". The E-Meter depicts more on the subject from the tortured thetans within the Pajamas Mothership.

Another Update: Steve Green asks:

Chef is the moral center of the South Park crew - not that that's saying a whole lot most days. So what will Parker and Stone do without him?

Hire another actor to perform Chef's voice, or, more than likely, create a whole new Chef character, and poke endless fun at the old Chef and his crack-up.

As one of Captain Ed's commenters suggests, the new Chef could serve the kids clams at every meal...

In her latest blog post, Cathy Seipp writes that she's not very happy when readers cut and paste her entire articles and reprint them on their blogs--and I can second that emotion:

If you don't protect your right to something you'll lose it, and if writers allow their work to be reprinted for free all over the blogosphere, publishers will begin to wonder why they should bother to pay reprint fees. It's a real problem, so don't steal my work like that. If you're using your blog as a sort of online scrapbook of interesting newspaper clippings, then please close it to the general public, so you're not actually republishing these things.

Something tells me though, that Mark Steyn must be feeling pretty amused right now after having the gist of his benchmark "It's the Demography, Stupid" article quoted by an Al Qaeda-linked Islamic leader living in Norway.

Here's Steyn, from December:

What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

* * *

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.

And here's Mullah Krekar, this week:

Norway’s most controversial refugee, Mullah Krekar, told an Oslo newspaper on Monday that there’s a war going on between “the West” and Islam. He said he’s sure that Islam will win, and he also had praise for suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

“We’re the ones who will change you,” Krekar told Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in his first interview since an uproar broke out over cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims.

“Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” Krekar said. “Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries are producing 3.5 children.

”By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.“

He claimed that ”our way of thinking... will prove more powerful than yours.“ He loosely defined ”western thinking“ as formed by the values held by leaders of western or non-islamic nations. Its ”materialism, egoism and wildness“ has altered Christianity, he claimed.

Krekar, who’s been supported by the Norwegian government since arriving as a refugee from northern Iraq in the early 1990s, now faces deportation after violating the terms of his refugee status and being deemed a threat to national security.

Krekar told Dagbladet that he favours Islamic rule where political and religious leaders are one and the same. One such leader he respects, he said, is Osama bin Laden. ”Osama bin Laden is a good person,“ Krekar said. He claimed Osama bin Laden is considered a terrorist simply because he lacks his own state.

Krekar's paraphrasing, so Steyn will have a tough time collecting his royalties, but still, it must quite a strange sensation to see your thesis being reiterated by someone on the front lines of the battle to destroy western civilization.

Update The Agora Weblog has translated the full English text of the interview with Krekar.

Mark Steyn writes "Media shockingly ignorant of Muslims among us":

A fellow called Mohammed mows down a bunch of students? Just one of those things -- like a gran'ma in my neck of the woods a couple of years back who hit the wrong pedal in the parking lot and ploughed through a McDonald's, leaving the place a hideous tangle of crumbled drywall, splattered patties and incendiary hot apple-pie filling. Yet, according to his own statements, Taheri-azar committed an act of ideological domestic terrorism, which he'd planned for two months. He told police he was more disappointed more students in his path weren't struck and that he'd rented the biggest vehicle the agency had in order to do as much damage to as many people as possible. The Persian car pet may have been flooring it, but the media are idling in neutral, if not actively reversing away from the story as fast as they can. Taheri-azar informed the judge he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah," and it was apparently the will of Allah that he get behind the wheel of Allah.

Meanwhile, a new Washington Post/ABC poll finds that, in the words of the Post, "nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence."

"Often" targeted? Want to put some hard numbers on that? Like to compare the "violence" Americans perpetrated on Muslims after the slaughter of thousands of their fellow citizens in the name of Allah with, say, the death toll perpetrated by Muslims annoyed over some itsy-bitsy cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper? In September 2001, 99.99999 percent of Americans behaved with remarkable forbearance. If they're less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt these days, perhaps it's because of casual slurs like the Post's or the no-jihad-to-see-here-folks tone of the Times.

Ronald Stockton of the University of Michigan doesn't see it that way: "You're getting a constant drumbeat of negative information about Islam," he told the Post. By "negative information," Professor Stockton presumably means the London bombings, and the Bali bombings, and the Madrid bombings and the Istanbul bombings. But surely it's worth asking why in 2006 the Washington Post needs a man with a name like "Ronald Stockton" to explain Islam to us? The diversity bores in the media go out of their way to hire writers of color, writers of gender, writers of orientation. Yet, five years after 9/11, where's the New York Times' Muslim columnist? Where's the ''Today Show's'' Islamic weather girl? Why, indeed, are all the Muslim voices in the press broadly on the right -- Amir Taheri in the New York Post, Stephen Schwartz in the Weekly Standard, Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal?

Considering the media's utter obsession with diversity and multiculturalism beginning in the late '80s and early '90s, it's a great question. Look at how quickly politicians on the left, most of whom have identical views on multiculturalism, and who ordinarily (with the possible exception of Al Gore from time to time) are the media's biggest backers, glommed on the Dubai ports deal to score cheap political points, as the Wall Street Journal noted:

So the same Democrats who lecture that the war on terror is really a battle for "hearts and minds" now apparently favor bald discrimination against even friendly Arabs investing in the U.S.? Guantanamo must be closed because it's terrible PR, wiretapping al Qaeda in the U.S. is illegal, and the U.S. needs to withdraw from Iraq, but these Democratic superhawks simply will not allow Arabs to be put in charge of American longshoremen. That's all sure to play well on al Jazeera.

Both sides are guilty on this, of course. But if I was an editor at the New York Times, and listening to Hillary and Chuck opposing a Muslim-run business, I'd wonder seriously what went wrong.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts from Jim Geraghty and Jack Kelly.

He may be The Only Republican in San Francisco, but he was far the only person to show up at the Danish Consulate for today's rally in support of the Dutch cartoonists and free speech--including at least one "hottie handing out Havarti".

Bring your own Havarti and Carlsberg, but click on over for photos, details, and links.

Way, way out there; Tim Blair writes:

Who was behind those Danish Motoons? Lyndon LaRouche knows:

George Shultz is behind that cartoon run in Jyllands-Posten, which was used as a trigger to set off these Islamic protests around the world.

Personally, I suspect Charles M. Shultz. More of a cartooning background. Think about it.

Of course, Charles Schultz died in 2000.

Or at least that's what they want us to believe...

Jim Geraghty writes that American politics is in its post-tipping point phase:

In the USA Today poll, when asked, “Which comes closer to your view about Arab and Muslim countries that are allies of the United States?” 45 percent of respondents said, “trust the same as any other ally”; 51 percent said they trust these countries “less than other allies.”

That’s a remarkably honest poll result. Let’s face it, Americans have been told since kindergarten not to judge ethnic and religious groups differently from one another; now slightly more than half are willing to come out and say, “you know, I just don’t trust those guys as much as I trust others.”

Welcome to Post-Tipping Point politics. There is no upside to doing the right thing – which is to emphasize, as one blogger put it, that there is a difference between Dubai and Damascus. There is tremendous political upside to doing the wrong thing, boldly declaring, “I don’t care what the Muslim world thinks, I’m not allowing any Arab country running ports here in America! I don’t care how much President Bush claims these guys are our allies, I don’t trust them, and I’m not going to hand them the keys to the vital entries to our country!”

And more and more, I think Glenn Reynolds had it right; the entire Tipping Point phenomenon can be summed up as action and reaction. The Bush Administration’s reaction to the cartoon riots was comparably milquetoast. The violence and threats committed over the cartoons shocked, frightened and really, really angered Americans. They want somebody to smack the Muslim world back onto its heels and set them straight: “It doesn’t matter how offensive a cartoon is, you’re not allowed to riot, burn down embassies and kill people over it.”

They’re ashamed that Denmark is leading the fight over this.

When the Bush administration’s reaction was mostly equivocating statements and a failure to confront the Muslim world over its insistence of the worldwide applicability of its blasphemy laws, I suspect a lot of folks whose top issue is the war on terror concluded that Bush was going wobbly.

We’ve already seen endless negotiations with Iran, when most Americans who follow the issue are ready to declare Ahmedinijad as a millennial fruitcake aiming to bring about the apocalypse. Most who follow the Iraq war closely suspect Tehran is stirring things up there.

The interesting thing is the post-Tipping Point view on the Muslim world is alien to Bush; I suspect he would find it abhorrent. Unfortunately, that puts him out of step with a large chunk of the public — a vocal, angry chunk that is likely to have plenty of politicians courting it.

As Jim writes, this could lead to some ugly Perot-style third party slugmatches in 2008.

Rand Simberg has an idea whose time has come: Replace the clapped-out "Boondocks" comic strip with Chris Muir's brilliant "Day By Day".

An idea whose time has come? Actually, it's long overdue.

Back in the old days (ask your parents or grandparents), immigrants adjusted to the culture they were migrating to. But that's a rather fuddy-duddy way of looking at things, as Kofi Annan explains:

The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.

Staggeringly, Newsweek agrees with Kofi, Roger L. Simon notes:

I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity - in the post-cartoon riot world - to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary. Here's how the authors (there are three) sum it up near the end:

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality established, Europe's new toughness will feel like forced integration. "It's a form of creating a second-class citizenship," says Tariq Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. "All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant."

Oh, I get it. It's time for those atheistic Dutch and Danish to meet their Islamic guests mid-way. They should be half-misogynist and half-homophobic. Is that the kind of culture Newsweek really wants? Of course not. They're just lying phonies and poseurs. They continue, slightly further on:

It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious "Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness."

Open question? Maybe so, but I'll tell you a closed question - whether Saudi Arabia could ever accept Germans, Dutch or Danes living among them. Or sanctimonious Newsweek writers, for that matter. Enough already.

Well, maybe not: In Canada's Western Standard, Mark Steyn reminds the big Blue State north of the 49th Parallel that "History Swings Both Ways":

Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept, is an instructive read in that regard: he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a--what's the phrase? --"rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia. It's not a good time to be a gay man in Europe.

The question is whether Canada will prove more like the Continent and succumb to creeping Islamification or more like America and resistant to would-be encroachments? Which would you bet on?

Which would Newsweek?

Update (3/1/06): Welcome readers of Tim Blair! Be sure to look around the rest of the site; we hope there's much you'll enjoy here.

Speaking of Hollywood movie icons, did you know that Tom & Jerry was a Zionist conspiracy? Professor Hasan Bolkhari, Iranian “mass media expert” and cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, explains it all.

Which of course, begs the question: What Would Bugs Bunny Do?

Update: More from the cartoon kingdom: "Why Mommy Squirrel Is a Democrat", Power Line's Podcast interview with artist Jeremy Zilber.

There's a horrible pair of before and after photos on Free Republic.com of the damage done in a bombing of a 1,200-year-old Shiite shrine, which reduced it to rubble. Hugh Hewitt has links to several other sources for details. And Glenn Reynolds writes:

If Danish cartoons could create riots worldwide against the defamers of Islam, you'd think that bombing of mosques would create anti-terrorist marches all over.

Since the majority of the cartoon riots appear to have been organized top-down, sadly, I doubt too many spontaneous anti-terror protests will begin.

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

"As you surely realize", James D. Miller writes, the Lawrence Summers controversy at Harvard "mirrors the fight over the Mohamed cartoons" in the press.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Tapscott.

To borrow from the title of Hannah Arendt's classic book, the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 isn't an illustration of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity, as Mac Johnson of Human Events (via Tim Blair) points out:

As has now been well established by the Western press, five months ago a vicious right-wing propaganda rag in Denmark, possibly edited by a cryogenically preserved Nazi collaborator, sought specifically to denigrate Islam by commissioning a series of unspeakably horrible caricatures that baselessly portrayed Islam as having a tendency towards violence and intolerance.

Now, Muslims are not normally a people to congregate in mass protest and burn flags, hurl stones or break things. But this unprovoked act of cultural aggression (coming, as it did, out of the blue and occurring in Islam’s heartland, Denmark) was simply too much to take. Therefore, after five months of consideration, it was decided to make an exception for this case, and spontaneous protests broke out.

So it’s settled then. Had not the Jyllands-Posten newspaper committed its unforgivable violation of Sharia law, everything would be peaceful in the world. What we have here is a clear case of direct cause and effect, well isolated. That’s why the protestors targeted their anger narrowly at the newspaper in question and did not use the occasion to let loose a general pogrom of anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-Moderate rioting.

Oh wait, now that I think about it, that’s exactly what happened. After a suspicious pause that lasted longer than Joe Biden’s first set of hair plugs, the offended masses erupted in anger at the newspaper, Danish foods, the Prime Minister of Denmark, all the rest of Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, the principle of Free Speech, Israel, the Red Cross, the European Union, Christian churches, their own governments, Catholic Priests, the United States, Christian children, Ronald McDonald, and (of course) Kentucky Fried Chicken.

What? The United States cannot be on that list! Our brave State Department, always at the tip of any retreating spear, issued a condemnation of the cartoons and declared that free speech carries with it the responsibility not to say anything controversial. Plus, 99% of America’s media refused to even show the cartoons without more pixilation than they would provide for a daytime broadcast of “Caligula, The Larry Flynt Cut.”

Then why would many of the crowds feel a need to throw in a chorus of “Death to America!” and burn the U.S. flag at a riot over doodles from Denmark? Perhaps it was just habit. You know, like when I always miss the turn to go to the post office because I am so used to going straight at that intersection on my way to work. Or maybe it’s because the cartoons are just a pretext for many of the professionally angry that assembled at the riots.

Yes, there were many Muslims, normal people of a non-radical bent, that were offended by the cartoons (and embarrassed by the fact Islam is afflicted by so many radicals that the cartoons hit a chord), but they were not the ones doing photogenic things to embassies and effigies.

For the radicals that used the cartoons as an excuse to party like it’s 1999, it was all just a pretext. Had the cartoons not existed they would have been in the streets about something else. And once in the streets all the same targets would have been torched.

Elsewhere, Christopher Hitchens puts the Cartoon Intafada into perspective:

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let's be sure we haven't hurt the vandals' feelings.

You wish to say that it was instead a small newspaper in Copenhagen that lit the trail? What abject masochism and nonsense. It was the arrogant Danish mullahs who patiently hawked those cartoons around the world (yes, don't worry, they are allowed to exhibit them as much as they like) until they finally provoked a vicious response against the economy and society of their host country. For good measure, they included a cartoon that had never been published in Denmark or anywhere else. It showed the Prophet Mohammed as a pig, and may or may not have been sent to a Danish mullah by an anonymous ill-wisher. The hypocrisy here is shameful, nauseating, unpardonable. The original proscription against any portrayal of the prophet—not that this appears to be absolute—was superficially praiseworthy because it was intended as a safeguard against idolatry and the worship of images. But now see how this principle is negated. A rumor of a cartoon in a faraway country is enough to turn the very name Mohammed into a fetish-object and an excuse for barbaric conduct. As I write this, the death toll is well over 30 and—guess what?—a mullah in Pakistan has offered $1 million and a car as a bribe for the murder of "the cartoonist." This incitement will go unpunished and most probably unrebuked.

Could things become any more sordid and cynical? By all means. In a mindless attempt at a tu quoque, various Islamist groups and regimes have dug deep into their sense of wit and irony and proposed a trade-off. You make fun of "our" prophet and we will deny "your" Holocaust. Even if there were any equivalence, and Jewish mobs were now engaged in trashing Muslim shops and embassies, it would feel degrading even to engage with such a low and cheap stunt. I suppose that one should be grateful that the Shoah is only to be denied rather than, as in some Islamist propaganda, enthusiastically affirmed and set out as a model for emulation. But only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The memory of the Third Reich is very vivid in Europe precisely because a racist German regime also succeeded in slaughtering millions of non-Jews, including countless Germans, under the demented pretext of extirpating a nonexistent Jewish conspiracy. As it happens, I am one of the few people to have publicly defended David Irving's right to publish, and I think it outrageous that he is in prison in Austria for expressing his opinions. But my attachment to free speech is at least absolute and consistent. Those who incite murder and arson, or who silkily justify it, are incapable of rising above the childish glee that culminates in the assertion that two wrongs make a right.

How silly have things gotten? This silly:

Ed Kallaher, who has an Irish surname, tried to get a Yahoo mail account using his name and couldn’t. He discovered that the word allah is banned, even in a character string. But is Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammad, God, Jehova? Nope.

I’m actually surprised Mohammad isn’t banned. It probably will be.

But this shows how the Islamic Radicals have spread fear to places you haven’t even thought about. If they were being sensitive to religion, why not ban the names of other people’s sacred figures?

If I were the MSM, I'd start to worry about the long-term implications of this current level of kowtowing. But I'm not at all sure if, institutionally, they're capable of that level of self-reflection, rather than merely reaction.

Update: "According to this story in The Register, the Allah ban was real, but short-lived". Good to see! And notice the lower-case spelling of God in the subhead of the The Register story--at least they're attempting to be equal-opportunity offenders!

Jim Geragthy writes, "If the whole thing weren't such a deadly serious issue, I would say that Danish cartoon protesting has jumped the shark":

From the Washington Post:

About 40 protesters gathered yesterday in front of the Danish Embassy, shouting " Allahu akbar !" — Arabic for "God is great!" — in a peaceful demonstration against a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons of the Islamic prophet Muhammad...

Leading the demonstration was D.C. lawyer Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party. He and other speakers criticized the cartoons but went on to address a long list of targets: the Bush administration, Western civilization, slavery, Zionists and Dick Cheney's hunting skills. Even breakfast pastry was not spared.

"I'm not going to eat any more Danish in my life — no strawberry Danish, no cheese Danish," Shabazz intoned.

There was no word on his stance on whether his breakfast would include French toast, as a French newspaper had published the cartoons as well.

Heh. As Jim writes, "It's good that moderate Muslims in America are expressing themselves through peaceful protest, but I hope they understand that Islam's reputation isn't being shaped by their lawful actions; it's being shaped by the arson and murder overseas".

Writing in The Guardian, Glenn Reynolds looks at the Washington media that goes to 11--and never modulates its volume:

As Daniel Henninger noted in the Wall Street Journal, it was a pattern we had seen before. "Have you ever noticed how," Henninger wrote, "on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

"The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush national guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

"There was a time when what has been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14 or deeper in the newscast ... Not with this presidency. Every downside event - large, small and in-between - plays on the front page above the fold now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this 'is part of the secretive nature of this administration'.

"Here are some of the political and media bonfires that have been lit on the White House lawn, stoked and reignited over the past five years: the 'stolen' 2000 election, Halliburton, 'Fahrenheit 9/11', Cheney lives in an 'undisclosed location', Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantánamo Bay, Bush lied about WMD, secret CIA prison sites, Valerie Plame, the neocons ... Cheney's 'secret' energy task force, Cindy Sheehan, Bush is destroying social security, Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, illegal wiretaps, Bill Frist's stock sales, what else?"

With a nod to the movie Spinal Tap, I would say the media treatment of Bush administration scandals "goes to 11". This lack of proportion reflects poorly on the press and on Bush's opponents (categories that often seem indistinct these days) but in some ways it actually benefits Bush and the Republicans. First, the tendency of the press and opposition to seize on stories that reflect their own prejudices, rather than their newsworthiness, means stories that might actually harm the Grand Old Party get ignored in the rush to pick up on those that symbolise why they dislike the administration.

As Glenn writes earlier in the piece, these include stories such as:

Its response to the "cartoon jihad" by Islamic extremists has been limp. There seems no clear plan, beyond allowing the obviously ineffective diplomacy of the EU to continue, for dealing with Iran. US domestic spending is out of control, and an anti-pork-barrel movement among conservatives and libertarians (of which I am part) is targeting Republican congressional representatives as well as Democrats, not surprising given that Republicans are in control of Congress, and chafing at the White House's lack of support for spending limits.

Reading between the lines of the media figures being quoted in Matt Drudge's latest post, you get the feeling that some of them know off their profession is off the rails as much as half their audience does. But they have no idea how to right the ship, to mix transportation metaphors.

The issues that Glenn lists above as Bush being vulnerable on are conservative/libertarian issues. But it would go against the Washington press corps' ideology to explore those topics. Fox News might, but CNN's Jack Cafferty gave away how most journalists view that channel, when he sneeringly referred to them as "The F-Word Network". So any topic Fox explores is automatically suspect in the eyes of the rest of the media.

So let's look at the topics that Reynolds mentions, through the same prism that the bulk of the MSM views life:

Spending out of control? Ever since the days of LBJ's Great Society, liberalism has been defined by entitlements. The same press that to man doesn't own a gun would love to see America's defense budget cut. Is there anything else they'd agree is a good, positive budget cut?

The cartoon crisis? That would run the risk of actually having to show the cartoons--or writing that maybe, just maybe, the Muslim rioters are wrong. In a press obsessed with multiculturalism (read Bill McGowan's Coloring The News for a thorough discussion of journalism and that issue), so much for that.

Iran and nukes? Well hey, isn't that what the UN is for? I mean, they were doing a swell job in Iraq on that issue, UNTIL GEORGE BUSH INVADED!

And we're right back to the Spinal Tap--all Marshall amps on 11, all the time--media.

"If Bush's opponents had a sense of proportion and a measure of self-discipline, he would be in trouble. Luckily for him, they don't", the Professor concludes, and he's right.

Michelle Malkin has "your weekend Cartoon Jihad photo album": photo after photo cars, embassies, and Danish and American flags going up in smoke.

Meanwhile, she notes that the bounty on the Danish cartoonists' heads is now up to 11.5 million dollars. The article that Michelle links to in the Arab News is unintentionally deeply ironic:

A minister in India’s Uttar Pradesh state government has offered a reward of $11.5 million to anyone who would kill any of the cartoonists who drew the images of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

I guess peace doesn't move in two directions on the Arab street.

Matt Drudge writes that this week will be another week of CheneyMania from the legacy media:

On CNN's RELIABLE SOURCES, WASHINGTON POST reporter Dana Milbank fretted that the White House is exploiting the public's growing disdain for the mainstream media. "Of course they succeed,” Milbank said of Bush aides. “The press always looks awful. They will once again make us look awful.”

CNN's Candy Crowley added: "The perception is that we're whining."

Occasionally, perception really is reality.

Or as Mark Steyn writes today:

It's easy to be tough about nothing. The press corps that noisily champions "the public's right to know" about a minor hunting accident simultaneously assures the public that they've no need to see these Danish cartoons that have caused riots, arson and death around the world. On CNN, out of "sensitivity" to Islam, they show the cartoons but with the Prophet's face pixilated so that he looks as if Cheney's ventilated him with birdshot and it turned puffy and gangrenous. C'mon, guys, these are interesting times. Anyone can unload the umpteenth round of blanks into the bulletproof Chimpy Hallibushitler, but why not take a shot at something that matters?

Courage, boys!--To borrow one of Dan Rather's old riffs.

Update: Besides the under-reported cartoon-driven unrest in the Muslim world, in a post titled, "Ground Control To MSM: Your Judgement's Dead, There's Something Wrong", Will Collier drops another important, but ignored story right into the collective laps of the press:

A credible allegation that an American citizen was attacked, beated and robbed in his own home by agents of a hostile foreign power because of his political views and activities.

Call me a press-hating fascist wingnut, but I think that's a big story. That's a page one, lead for a week, cover-of-Time-and-Newsweek story. Why the hell are you whining yourselves hoarse about how long it took the White House press corps to learn about a minor hunting accident?

Think they'll take him up on the offer and persue the story?

Nahh, me neither.

Ed Morrissey links to Jeff Jacoby's latest essay on the cowardly nature of the American press and writes:

At the same time, the same media outlets that have kept its customers in the dark in one of the most important stories in the conflict with radical Islamists screeched like banshees when Dick Cheney took all of eighteen hours to reveal that he had accidentally shot his hunting partner and friend on a Saturday afternoon. For days, these stalwarts of journalistic courage took turns castigating Scott McClellan for Cheney's failure to give the story to the White House press corps, arguing that the story was so important that it could not be trusted to the Corpus Christi local paper to inform the nation. David Gregory, whose network has not even allowed a pixilated version of the Prophet cartoons to appear lest they incur the wrath of Muslim terrorists, accused the White House of censorship and coverups in supposedly hiding the shooting from the nation.

Jacoby has this correct. The media attacks those who they know will not spend much energy fighting back. Gregory could act like a rude, spoiled child denied his choice of birthday gift because he knew the White House would not dare to even expel him from the room.

Expel him? If I were in the Bush White House I'd go out of my way to encourage this sort of behavior on camera as much as possible.

The Washington Press Corp--by their behavior both in and out of the White House--did much to advance the Bush Press Thesis this past week--to the point where the light bulb is just now starting to slowly go on inside even David Gregory's head about how badly he and his comrades looked.

Well, these folks don't beat around the bush, do they? Nor does this fellow.

Just out of curiosity, what do the people carrying signs praising Hitler think of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent spate of Holocaust denial?

Update: In contrast to the above lunacies, Betsy Newmark and Mansoor Ijaz have some thoughts that are well worth reading, on, as Betsy puts it, "how Muslim leaders could have behaved if they truly had the interests of Muslims in mind".

Another Update: John Hinderaker spotlights the organizational efforts behind the recent cartoon protests--which killed 11 in Libya yesterday, and 15 in Nigera today, incidentally:

FIfteen thousand people turned out in Hyde Park today to protest the Danish cartoons. They were bused in from all over England, which highlights the fact that we are not dealing here with spontaneous outbreaks of indignation, but with a coordinated campaign that is kept going because many Muslim leaders believe it advances their interests.

The AP quotes Taji Mustafa, spokesman for the Muslim Action Committee, which organized the Hyde Park event:

Mustafa said the cartoons were reminiscent of attacks on Jews in European publications in the 1930s.

"Now there is a demonization of the Muslim community, so we have to speak up to prevent something like the Holocaust from happening," he said.

The analogy is silly, of course, but, hey, look on the bright side--at least he admits that the Holocaust did take place.

Heh.

Another quasi-religious icon gets slandered; will the Southeast street join the already bitter Midwest street in seething, riotous anger?

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 I wrote last year, big media isn't going to like the how this trend plays out if the folks driving it get their way.

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.

Exactly.

Heretofore this weekend, I haven't covered the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006, but here's a whirlwind tour of the action. Charles Johnson spots French retailer Carrefour advertising the removal of Danish products from their shelves, all the while denying that they're removing Danish products from their shelves. (Duplicitous French...grocers?)

Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin links to video of two staggeringly brave Protest Warrior-style counter-demonstrators flying the Danish flag in the midst of a babillian Muslims marching in Paris. (Note the "You--The Homosexuals!!!" epithet shouted by one fellow when he spots the two counter-protestors, which The Anchoress also spotted. As in the case of the Soviet Union, the western left are supporting an ideology that bans the very freedoms tolerated in Europe and America.)

Which is something that Michael Kinsey picks up on:

“The bewildered prime minister of Denmark, trying to calm the whirlwind that has descended on his innocent, unsuspecting country, gets it spectacularly wrong when he reassures disgruntled Muslims that Denmark supports "freedom of religion" and is "one of the world's most tolerant and open societies." Tolerance, openness, and freedom of religion are not what they have in mind. A lively debate is going on about whether Islam really does forbid any portrayal of the prophet, however benign, or whether that is a recent innovation of some subset of the faithful with possible ulterior motives. This debate misses the point. Some Christians believe they are required to wear particular sorts of clothing. Some Jews and Muslims don't eat pork. They don't claim that their religion requires other people to wear special clothing or avoid eating pork. Tolerance and ecumenism can only do so much. They have nothing to offer a Muslim in Afghanistan who is personally insulted and enraged about an image that appears in a newspaper in Denmark."

As Andrew Stuttaford remarks, "Michael Kinsey nails it. Yes, really."

Or as Glenn Reynolds writes, "Like race riots in the early 20th Century, this is a case of ignorant yahoos being exploited by elites in order to protect the elites' power against civilizing influences."

Update: Via Betsy Newmark, Theodore Dalrymple has some thoughts on last year's Clash of Civilizations, or as we once dubbed it, the Great Burning Citroen Crisis of 2005.

Another Update: Tammy Bruce writes that Sweden is the first western nation to censor The Cartoons That Dare Not Be Shown:

In an absolutely outrageous decision for any democratic Western country, the government of Sweden has shut down a website that was showing the Mohammad cartoons.

Sweden views itself, as leftist governments usually do, as progressive, tolerant, and flame-holders for personal liberty. With this act, they expose the ultimate nature of socialism and leftists--the willingness to smash freedom of expression and personal liberty in the name of 'security.'

While Sweden is the first Western nation to officially censor (Islamic nations have done so, but fascism and Islamic theocracies go hand in hand), let us hope it is the last. But this does not bode well when it comes to whether or not the West has the wherewithall to stand up for itself and its values. What could crush western European values now is the same thing that crushed it in the first half of the last century--when leftist socialism infects government, fascism is not far behind. Fascist control of media is the first act, always in the name of 'safety' or 'for the best of everyone,' or to ostensibly maintain 'social control.'

Swedes everywhere should be appalled and up in arms. So far, though, we've heard virtually nothing from the people of that 'progressive' country as it essentially abandons its neighbors Denmark and Norway, and the basic tenets and values that keep the Western world free.

The values of freedom are lovely and nice when one does not have to defend them.When we are challenged is when we find out who we really are. The Germans learned what was at their core in the last century. Sweden, are you to be the first Western nation in the 21st century to surrender to fascism?

As the well-known aphorism (usually credited to Jean-Francois Revel) goes, fascism is always descending on the United States, but somehow it always does seems to land on Europe.

It's been a while since I've linked to Andrew Sullivan, but I think he's got a great observation here, regarding journalism's role in the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006:

It's fascinating, isn't it, how this war has so often come down to what we are and are not allowed to see. We were not allowed to see (for long) the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the U.S. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see the cartoons that are being used by Islamists for another round of violent intimidation of free societies.

And then, of course, there is what makes this war different. The web has made it possible to see almost all of this, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pics are actually out of view for most people - and, even then, some have been kept back by editors, who see their job as preventing the flow of information, rather than enabling it. And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward, to become an arbiter of sensitivity and good taste. And it's up to places like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, images and informed opinions. Obviously, I don't see the need to publish everything. And editorial judgment counts. But we are approaching a time when the MSM may have that as precisely its role - not as a source of information, but as an arbiter of social etiquette and good judgment. The NYT as Miss Manners.

But that's actually nothing new. When Tom Wolfe wrote The Right Stuff, he described newspapers, collectively, as the Proper Victorian Gentleman. He saw firsthand how much news is withheld from readers, in an effort to be, as Sullivan writes, arbiters of "social etiquette and good judgment", as this response to a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone's Chet Flippo indicates:

I’ll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy’s death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there’s nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick’s. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president’s assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

Mark Steyn explored this phenomenon as well, in his obituary of Katharine Graham, longtime publisher of the Washington Post:

Her formula for her publications was succinctly expressed: "Mass With Class" -- "perhaps the best three-word definition for what a good news magazine should be," wrote Mark Whitaker in Newsweek. But what "Mass With Class" boils down to in practice is the genteel middlebrow conformity that makes so much of the mainstream U.S. media such a world-class yawnfest. "Mass With Class" means you don't ask Hillary Clinton about her husband's perjury and trashing of his, ahem, female acquaintances but only whether she finds it difficult coping with the accusations and if she thinks this is because conservatives have a difficult time dealing with her as a strong intelligent woman in her own right. "Mass With Class" means Dan Rather piously declaring that the Chandra Levy story is too unseemly for the CBS Evening News, no matter that it involves a Congressman obstructing a police investigation.

"Mass With Class" equals "All the news that's fit to print" and it's never more protective than when giving the mass a glimpse of the class. Thus, Mrs. Graham's death clippings tell us more in their oleaginous uniformity about the relationship between journalism and politics than the heroics of Woodward and Bernstein ever did. The mourners at her funeral "read like a Who's Who," albeit a somewhat obvious one: Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, Oscar de la Renta, John McCain, Tina Brown. I shall refrain from disparaging the guest list any further as our own power couple, Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel, were also among those present. But the cosiness of this world is American journalism's principal problem: There is "us" and there is "them," the "class" and the "mass," and the media have long since decided which side of the fence they belong on.

It may be that one of the reasons why the press hates the Blogosphere is not just that they've lost control over the flow of information, but that they've also lost control over the tone of public discourse.

This isn't to say that I'm happy to see the proper "social etiquette and good judgment" that Sullivan describes disappear from public discourse. (Though I'd argue that it disappeared long before blogs, as anybody who in the mid-1980s watched CNN's Crossfire or The Morton Downey Jr. Show saw: both shows were little more than pro-wrestling without the body slams or sexy girls holding the round cards.) But I'll happily take unfiltered information and opinion, via blogs whose tones I am comfortable with, than have it bottlenecked by self-imposed "Mass With Class" Victorian Gents.

Update: To easily see the Victorian Gentlemanly style in action, pick up a copy of a paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. (Or scroll through their Website of course, but it's even more obvious "on dead tree".) Read their coverage, of say, the protests outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' execution. Then peruse the photos of the same event at Zombietime.

Another Update: Welcome Lucianne.com, InstaPundit and SteynOnline readers! Please look around; we're sure there's lots of material here you'll enjoy.

No sooner did I finish drafting an article on the growing popularity of video on the Web, did I come across this video on Junk Yard Blog: "Taqiyya: Anatomy of the Comic Jihad". In about 30 seconds, it provides more expository information about how the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 began than you'll get on any network television news broadcast.

And it's got a good beat, and you can dance to it.

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Tim Blair notes that it hasn't been neccessary for rioting crowds in Afghanistan to actually have seen those cartoons to riot--and kill. The result has been four Afghans shot dead after crowds marched on a US military base. "Interestingly", Tim writes, "no riots were provoked by Egyptian newspaper Al Faqr‘s publication of the cartoons last October ..."

Funny, that.

Michelle Malkin writes the Cartoons That Dare Not Be Viewed ran in an Egyptian newspaper back in October--without incident:

Freedom for Egyptians notes that the Forbidden Cartoons were published in Al Fagr, an Egyptian newspaper last October. Cairo-based blog, Rantings of an Egyptian Sandmonkey, has scans of the paper with the cartoons and asks:

"Guess we will have to Boycott Egypt now as well, huh?"

Heh.

Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt hosted a roundtable discussion on the Cartoon Intafada, involving himself, fellow radio talkshow hosts Michael Medved and Dennis Prager, and from Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter. You can read a transcript, and/or listen online, here. Here's an excerpt, with some amazing statistics--or at least speculation--from Dennis Prager:

HH: I have a question for all three of you. I'm going to start with you, Dennis Prager. What percentage of Islam worldwide do you think is now radicalized?

DP: I would say...I would say at least 20%.

HH: And of the remaining 80%, how much of that do you think is susceptible to radicalization?

DP: Half. I'll give you an example.

HH: Please.

DP: I don't just draw these out of thin air. The Egyptian pilot who brought down the Egypt Air airline in an act of suicide and murdered everybody aboard?

HH: Right.

DP: The Egyptian government and people and press all backed the idea that it was Boeing's fault, and that it was an American plot to blame the Egypt Air pilot. The ability to self-criticize in that part of the world right now is as close to zero as I have seen in my lifetime.

Absolutely. And needless to say, read or listen to the rest.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has numerous related links (there's a shocker, huh?), including this observation from Austin Bay:

"The Danish 'Cartoon War' is an information warfare operation conducted by Islamist terror groups and at least two Middle Eastern dictatorships (Syria and Iran)."

A reader of Michelle Malkin spots CNN's newest riff:

CNN is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of Prophet Mohammed because the network believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself.

Fine. Don't ever run the photo that accompanies this article again, boys. Or as John Hinderaker writes, "That would explain why CNN didn't show the Abu Ghraib photos".

(2000 CNN article via Charles Johnson.)

Update: Jim Geraghty notes a similar hypocrisy from the New York Times:

So - the New York Times writes about the Danish cartoon controversy, and includes a photo of demonstrators... and one other photo. The caption:

Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" was at the center of controversy when shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

Yup, it's the Virgin Mary depicted in elephant dung painting.

What a bunch of wimps. They'll run photos of art that offends Christians from seven years ago in a heartbeat, but they won't dare run a cartoon that could offend their Muslim readers.

I wonder why.

Meanwhile, the former chief executive of the BBC, and an admitted atheist, wants to know why Islam is covered much less skeptically by the BBC than Christianity is:

Will Wyatt, the chief executive for three years until 1999, examined the site on religion and ethics and found that it was “written as fact” that Mohammed met an angel.

The site states: “One night in 610 he was meditating in a cave on the mountain when he was visited by the angel Jibreel who ordered him to ‘recite’... words which he came to understand were words of God.”

The site, seemingly written by a devout Muslim, stated without reservation that Mohammed was “generally accepted as the true, final prophet of God”.

Mr Wyatt, an atheist, said that he had no axe to grind, and was struck by how much more different - “and accurate” - the BBC’s description of Christianity was, where the birth of Jesus was mentioned as being “believed by Christians” and that Jesus “claimed” that he spoke with the authority of God.

A BBC spokesman said: “We will have a look at the wording on the site.”

And then do absolutely nothing differently.

This just in: The seething Midwest street explodes after prominent quasi-religious icon slandered in cartoon!

Update The Jewish street just exploded as well...

Michelle Malkin notes that Father Andrea Santoro, an Italian Catholic priest, was killed this past weekend in Turkey.

"Now, a culprit has been caught", Malkin writes. "And the motive is reportedly--you guessed it--the Muhammad Cartoons".

Michelle has lots more today on the cartoon intafada, including a note of solidarity from President Bush to the Danish Prime Minister. Just keep scrolling.

Tim Blair notes that the Philadelpha Inquirer is one of the few U.S. newspapers to publish a caricature of Mohammad from the series that launched what Michael Medved dubbed "The Great Cartoon Crisis":

"This is the kind of work that newspapers are in business to do,” said Amanda Bennett, the newspaper’s editor.

And that's usually the case, except when there's a risk to your reporters, your office building, or both.

Update: Cathy Seipp writes that the liberal Inquirer and the conservative New York Sun are the only newspapers in America that have run any of the offending cartoons. (To my knowledge, Fox News is the only TV channel that has aired one of the cartoons, with the exception of CNN's lame attempt to pixelate Muhammad's face.)

Another Update: A reader emails that she saw one of the offending cartoons on a local TV station:

I saw one of the Danish cartoons on local TV here in San Francisco -- I think it was the NBC affiliate. I was surprised but glad to see that not every media outlet is running scared.

It's probably reasonably safe to extrapolate that it's not the only one--that there are other local stations that are individually choosing to run the cartoons.

Relapsed Catholic looks at Big League Fact Checking in the Great White North:

"This isn't a correction, but it's one heck of an error on the website of CTV, Canada's number one broadcaster. It's in a story about the reaction to newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed:

One of the cartoons depicts the Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a burning fuse.

In another, a Soviet star and cresent moon are superimposed over his face.

D'oh!

And Michelle Malkin notes some superb photo captioning over at Reuters:

Yahoo!/Reuters caption:

Lebanese Islamists tear a Swiss flag in front of the Danish consulate in Beirut February 5, 2006. Angry demonstrators set the Danish consulate in Beirut ablaze on Sunday and the violent turn in protests over publication of cartoons of Prophet Mohammad drew condemnation from European capitals and moderate Muslims. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

Swiss. Danish. All the same to them.

For Thanksgiving of 2001, during the early days of InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Any time you start to doubt yourself, and wonder if you're fit for the big leagues of American thought and opinion, you can just read The Times and be thankful that the standards of the big leagues aren't so high.

And the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 proves that it's not just the Times that sets the middling standards of big media.

"Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now."

--Jeff Jacoby

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Theodore Dalrymple has a typically superb essay titled, "Is 'Old Europe' Doomed?" on the CATO Unboard Website. If you'd like to place the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006, and The Great Burning Citroen Crisis of 2005 into context, this is a must-read piece:

This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the Prime Minister, M. Dominque de Villepin, but the vastly more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out.

The principal motor of Europe’s current decline is, in my view, its obsession with social security, which has created rigid social and economic systems that are extremely resistant to change. And this obsession with social security is in turn connected with a fear of the future: for the future has now brought Europe catastrophe and relative decline for more than a century.

What exactly is it that Europeans fear, given that their decline has been accompanied by an unprecedented increase in absolute material well-being? An open economy holds out more threat to them than promise: they believe that the outside world will bring them not trade and wealth, but unemployment and a loss of comfort. They therefore are inclined to retire into their shell and succumb to protectionist temptation, both internally with regard to the job market, and externally with regard to other nations. And the more those other nations advance relative to themselves, the more necessary does protection seem to them. A vicious circle is thus set up.

In the process of course, the state is either granted or arrogates to itself (or, of course, both) ever-greater powers. A bureaucratic monster is created that takes on a life of its own, that is not only uneconomic but anti-economic, and that can be reformed only at the cost of social unrest that politicians naturally wish to avoid. Inertia intermittently punctuated by explosion is therefore the most likely outcome.

As I wrote back in November, during the Paris riots:

The now-defunct Ottoman Empire was the first of several countries over the previous century to be dubbed "The Sick Man of Europe". But economically and socially, Europe as a whole increasingly looks to be the Sick Man of the World, with dire--and now immediate--consequences for all of its population.

Of course, it is possible to end a malaise and restore vitality, but the EU's endless bureaucracy is far too entrenched--and far too blind--to allow such measures to actually be implemented.

With the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 apprarently drawing first blood, and spreading as far as New Zealand, Stephen Green writes, "there will come a time when the International Left will have to choose sides"--and that includes Hollywood:

Already, it's happening in Holland. Denmark will be next, perhaps followed by Norway. Can California be that far behind?

Threatening Salmon Rushdie didn't get Hollywood on board, because they don't read books. Forcing some Danish cartoonists into hiding won't be much help, either. But someday, maybe soon, Hollywood will do something which they think is a positive - and suddenly Steven Soderbergh or someone will be camped out at Dick Cheney's Undisclosed Location. When that day comes, we'll gain a new ally.

The Bloggy Right has been fighting the good fight for four years now. But if this really is a civilizational war, then we're going to need more allies. We need professional help in the effort to teach the Arab World that firebombs and fatwas are no match for free speech. And, like it or not, we need TV and movies and cable to help us get our message across.

Our message comes down to this: They're just comics, you bullying bastards. Grow up.

And as this cartoon attempts to illustrate, they're nothing compared with the vile cartoons coming out of the Middle East on a daily basis.

Last night, I wrote:

Remember all the riots, looting and torching when Dogma and The Last Temptation of Christ played at your local multiplex?

Me neither.

Today, like its counterpart in Syria, the Danish consulate in Beirut was burned. Or as Michelle Malkin puts it, "Another Day, Another Embassy Torched". Meanwhile, Mark Steyn writes:

NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.

Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.

And Charles Johnson notes similar hypocrisy at CNN:

CNN has been accompanying every story about the cartoon jihad with the boilerplate message:

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam.

But they apparently have no such “respect” for Christianity; they didn’t hesitate for a second to show this image of the virgin Mary made out of elephant dung and pictures of female genitalia: New York, Brooklyn museum settle funding dispute. (Hat tip: christheprofessor.)

Why don’t they just come clean and admit why they won’t show the Mohammed cartoons?

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of fear of Islam.

As Steyn writes:

Very few societies are genuinely multicultural. Most are bicultural: On the one hand, there are folks who are black, white, gay, straight, pre-op transsexual, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, worshippers of global-warming doom-mongers, and they rub along as best they can. And on the other hand are folks who do not accept the give-and-take, the rough-and-tumble of a "diverse" "tolerant" society, and, when one gently raises the matter of their intolerance, they threaten to kill you, which makes the question somewhat moot.

One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia. As a famously sensitive Dane once put it, "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Or as Glenn Reynolds puts it:

Once again, the message is that if you blow things up, or even look as if you might, we'll be nice to you. And once again, I note that this is a very unwise message to send.

Heh, indeed.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

So, did the cartoons and their aftermath make it easier or more diffcult for Musharraf of Pakistan to continue to guide his country away from the lure of the jihadists? Easier or more difficult for Turkey to remain a friend of the West's? Easier or more difficult for the pro-Western people of Iran to summon the courage to change their government? Easier or more difficult for Jordan's King Abdullah to continue his course, which has included support for the reconstruction of Iraq even in the face of Zarqawi's murderers?

In a wired world, there aren't any inconsequential actions, and everything is grist for the propagandists among the jihadists.

That doesn't mean censorship, or even self-censorship. Only a bit of reflection before rushing off to start new battles which divert attention from those already underway.

There is a chasm of difference between serious commentary on the Islamic challenge facing Europe and the West (see Mark Steyn's "It's The Demographics Stupid") and crude, sweeping anti-Muslim propaganda. It isn't necessary to defend the latter in order to uphold and praise the former.

He's right. Nonetheless, (sorry, a conjunction of some sort was invevitable at this point, and that seemed the most stylish word to choose from), it's also worth revisiting an August 2005 essay by Cathy Seipp:

Whenever liberals remind us that not all Muslims are terrorists or anti-American rioters, I always think that not everyone in the pre-civil-rights south was a church bomber or member of the Ku Klux Klan. Even then, there was lots to like about the south. Southerners always have been known for charm and hospitality — rather like Palestinians today, whom the foreign press finds much more appealing than brusque and bossy Israeli soldiers.

It's fair to say, however, that despite the existence of many decent people and even the occasional Atticus Finch type, southerners a generation or two ago were not exactly unsympathetic to ideas the Klan had about uppity blacks or busybody federal lawmakers trying to come in and destroy their way of life. But liberals then did not tsk-tsk about the observation that the segregated south was a toxic, racist culture that had to change — nor did they explain to blacks impatient about local traditions like "colored" water fountains that really, this is a different culture after all, and we need to be sensitive and understanding.

Certainly I realize that there are differences between the pre-civil-rights south and Islamists today. The animosity of segregationists was focused on blacks; Islamists especially hate Jews, but also aren't fond of Americans, Christians, women, homosexuals, Buddhist statues, Hindus, irreverent Dutch filmmakers or the entire Western way of life. And even at its worst, the segregated south wasn't expansionist, at least not in the 20th century. When George Wallace stood in that schoolhouse door, he didn't mean that schools across the entire planet should conform to his notions of separate but equal — or watch out for the suicide bombers.

If what Austin Bay and Charles Moore write is corrent, a lot of innocent people have been manipulated from on-high--by the Syrnian government and by imams in Denmark. Of course, any time an angry mob appears, there are a few true believers, and a lot of innocent dupes.

Which is why Dean Esmay condemns a broadside by Neil Boortz against Islam, and is right to do so.

And Dean is spot-on when he writes:

Muslims who want to defeat terrorism are my brothers. They're yours too.

Absolutely.

Glenn Reynolds writes that the Danish Embassy in Syria was torched.

Given the cause of the fire, one of Mark Steyn's best observations still holds very much true:

These days, whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves a fellow called Mohammed. A plane flies into the World Trade Centre? Mohammed Atta. A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. A sniper starts killing petrol station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed. A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. A gang-rapist in Sydney? Mohammed Skaf.

Jeff Goldstein has some thoughts on what this latest crisis portends for the future of liberalism worldwide.

And Eugene Volokh notices--surprise!--a double-standard at the Boston Globe, and Sissy Willis asks, et tu, Fox?

No doubt, the meetings inside the boardrooms of both CNN and Fox went something like this.

Finally (for now), Queen Margrethe II of Denmark sounds like she understands the enormity of the crisis--which is far larger than just this one story:

“We are being challenged by Islam these years - globally as well as locally. It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and lazy.

”We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.“

”And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction."

Indeed.

Update: Steyn's November 15th "Bicultural bye-bye" essay discussed the inherent conflict between the twin cultures of Europe, "aging native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that’s it", as opposed to the rich mosaic of America's diverse population. It's a rather timely reprint on his site today.

And Austin Bay has some thoughts on the torching of the Danish Embassy in Syria:

Thousands enraged, huh? More likely scenario: the dictatorship is using The Cartoon War as a convenient issue to deflect the anti-regime heat building inside Syria and shift media focus from the murder investigation.

Via Hugh Hewitt, who writes, "Time for the Assad regime to go".

Another Update: Michelle Malkin reminds us (and newspapers and television stations) that "It Is Not 'A Row'". And Ed Morrissey looks at "The Contrived Cartoon Network":

It appears that the controversy over the Prophet cartoons has been somewhat artificially enhanced by Muslim imams in Denmark, according to the London Telegraph. Numerous readers and commenters have pointed towards this article by Charles Moore, who reports that not only did these cartoons appear months ago, but the Danish imams included a few more than European newspapers never printed in order to fuel the outrage of their followers.

Imams fueling outrage? I'm shocked. Shocked!

And LaShawn Barber explains "Why Rolling Stone Didn’t Put Kanye West as Muhammad on the Cover":

Liberal editors are a lot smarter than they look. If Rolling Stone had put Kanye West posing as Muhammad on the cover, they’d be in hiding, too. Instead, they chose the safer route: West, a rapper and contributor to the cultural toilet, posing with a crown of thorns on his head.

Christ is fair game, isn’t he? Unbelievers, liberals, and other secularists make fun of him, mock him, scorn him, and curse him, yet they steer clear of doing the same with Muslims’ god. They know offended Muslims, unlike offended Christians, issue death threats.

Remember all the riots, looting and torching when Dogma and The Last Temptation of Christ played at your local multiplex?

Me neither.

Another, 'Nother Update: The The Only Republican in San Francisco (sadly, probably accurately named), explores "The Rovian view of the cartoon kerfuffle":

While unintentional, this is classic political rope-a-dope on the part of the West. Many people will draw the conclusion that Islamists are fundamentally and violently opposed to Western mores. Moderate Muslims do not make the headlines, and are unfortunately lumped in with the extremists. Remind you of a certain American political party?

As he writes--and I concur--"For the record, I’m not an advocate of mocking any religion. Until, of course, one is told that one can’t." (See also, Hubbard, L. Ron.)

And Sissy Willis explores a somewhat similar theme.

In my post below about The Great Cartoon Crisis Of 2006, I wondered if we've heard from Ted Rall or Tom Toles on the story. While I don't know if either of them have opined, John Ruberry of Marathon Pundit notes that Rall was on Hannity & Colmes defending Toles' disgusting cartoon featuring a multiple amputee American soldier, and his own attacks on Pat Tillman in 2004:

Hannity brought up Ted Rall's Tillman cartoon, and Rall went into full whine mode, claiming that Hannity's producer promised him that Sean wouldn't bring that up. In a heated exchange, Hannity said that he doesn't "make deals," and Alan Colmes backed him.

A minute or so later, Sean called the Tillman cartoon "beyond disgrace," and said to Rall's face that he was a "disgraceful human being" and "without a soul."

Even if you don't agree with Hannity (or Rall), it was great theater.

It usually is when Rall is called to defend his "art".

While I was driving back from lunch, that's what I heard Michael Medved describe, well, the great cartoon crisis of 2006. He particularly ripped CNN, for showing one of the offending Dutch cartoons depicting Muhammad, but with his face pixilated to protect Muslim sensibilities (not to mention, I guess, CNN's reporters' lives and their office towers' windows).

As I wrote in June after The Great Koran In The Can Crisis Of 2005:

If the media wants to claim that defacing the Koran in a POW camp full of captured terrorists is the crime of the century [or in 2006, that cartoons are worth threatening another 9/11 over], then it needs to follow its own logic to its natural conclusion: no more claiming that "art" such as Piss Christ is a bold artistic statement. No more episodes like this on Law & Order and other TV shows, unless they're roundly condemned by the press. An article such as Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" should be a multi-part investigative feature in the New York Times. There should be regular articles condemning the attacks of the ACLU against religious Christians or Christmas celebrations.

Because without a similar tone to coverage of religion in the US, Koran abuse stories at Gitmo looks exactly like it is: grandstanding hypocrisy of the worst order.

So how 'bout it, MSM? We now know how ardently you'll defend a religion which is practiced by about three million Americans according to Daniel Pipes, and roughly double that from other sources. Ready to start defending the Judeo-Christian faiths practiced by--or at a bare minimum, respected by--the other 290 million people in this country?

Glenn Reynolds links to an astonishing piece of Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement by the State Department and quotes a letter from one of his readers, who asks, "I'm sorry. Did I miss the State Dept. analysis of 'Piss Christ?' Perhaps you could link to it". Glenn responds:

I'm sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That's a very bad incentive structure, but it's the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.

Or as Dr. Sanity wrote yesterday:

Not many people realize it yet--particularly on the left--but in the Danish Muhammed cartoon controversy that has inflamed the Muslim world, the multicultural /politically correct mindset has now been fully exposed as a fraud. The shocking consequences and deadly potential of that fraud are suddenly becoming all too clear.

Indeed^TM.

Update: Great soundbite from Cathy Seipp:

The left finds exposing the uglier aspects of the Muslim world offensive because to them it's an article of faith that the Christian right in George W. Bush's America is at least as dangerous as international Islamic radicals. Never mind that the latter are rather more prone to violence than the former.

And at least in Europe, they've been rewarded and appeased endlessly for their violence.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson spots three different wire services attributing the State Department's memo condemning the Danish cartoons to three different people, and wonders "Is this story a hoax, or just hopelessly confused?"

Another Update: Shrinkwrapped believes that "The most interesting question concerns how this ends":

Will the Muslims settle for a non-apology apology that is the specialty of those schooled in the PC world? ("I am deeply sorry if my cartoon has offended anybody's feelings.") Or, will they continue to demand full obeisance to their skewed perception of what free speech involves?

If the Islamists feel that they are not yet ready to openly confront the Europeans on their home turf in Europe, prominent Imams will accept the proffered apology, the crowds will dissipate, and things will quiet down.

If the Islamists feel strong enough to confront and cow the West, the protests will escalate. If this occurs, I would suspect that the hands of al Qaeda and Iran will be found to be involved in increasing the agitation. And that would suggest that Iran indeed has the makings of a bomb. Ahmadinejad's increasingly violent rhetoric suggest he feels either desperate or powerful (and thus far he has not sounded like a desperate man); either way, the danger of a spark triggering widespread chaos in the setting of continuing Arabic rage, is all too real.

If I'm reading this correctly, here's someone reasonably positing that this could eventually lead to Iran's use of The Bomb.

From a cartoon published almost six months ago. Anybody get Ted Rall or Tom Toles' opinion on all of this?

Compare And Constrast: CNN pixilates the face of Muhammad in a cartoon to appease rioting Muslims.

Last year, the New York Times hired Andres Serrano, the artist behind "Piss Christ" to illustrate one of their articles.

One More: Michelle Malkin links to the Ironic Photo of the Day.

Update (2/4/06): Welcome InstaPundit readers, you'll find an update to this post, here.

We don't often have guest bloggers here, but a Mr. W.T. Pooh asked us to make an exception for one of his acquaintances:

Much more here and here; related compare-and-contrast post here.

My simple reply last night to Power Line's take on comic books has grown into an interesting cross-blog discussion. Start here, then follow the links.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes that Marvel has hired a conservative author to write a series of comic books on the war in Iraq.

Hinderaker adds:

I like it--this is a medium in which the liberals will have a hard time competing.

Don't be too sure--I haven't bought a comic book in 25 years, but since around the 1980s I'd guess, it seems like the left has increasingly been ensconced there, making changes subtle (thanks to Harlan Ellison, oddly enough, you don't see BB guns advertised in the back of comic books anymore) and sometimes not-so-subtle.

Update: John at Conservative English Major confirms my take, adding, "But liberals haven't just made 'inroads' into comics. For the most part, they control the creative side of the industry":

There are a few conservatives working in comics (John Byrne, for example) but the "hot" writers right now are Mark Millar (an anti-American Scotsman), Alan Moore (great writer, but so left wing he's off the charts), Frank Miller (who makes fun of Ronald Reagan in his "The Dark Night Returns"), Peter David (go see his blog and scroll on down - he hates Bush with a passion) - etc. etc. I could go on and on, but comics are, by and large, written by liberals.

The examples that John gave don't sound very liberal to me--although as Dennis Prager wrote, liberalism and the far left have become essentially synonymous, especially as "punitive liberalism" became the law of the left.

Another Update: J.W. Hastings of The Forager has also entered into the fray with his thoughts:

I don't think I'd say they "control" any part of the industry. But I think it's pretty safe to say that most mainstream comics, even if they aren't explicitly liberal or political, are at least built upon generally liberal assumptions about politics and society, and that this has been the case at least since the early 1970s. And most mainstream comics are pretty solidly anti-Bush, just as Mark Gruenwald's 1980s Captain America comics were solidly (and blatantly) anti-Reagan. (In Superman, for example, Lex Luthor has been elected President of the United States, a riff on the liberal fantasy that President Bush is some kind of criminal mastermind). However, there's very little of what I'd characterize as full-fledged leftism in mainstream comics.

Geez, if that's typical liberalism in comics, I'd hate to see what they'd do with "full-fledged leftism".

Comics used to be a way to teach kids about responsibility (cue Stan Lee's "With great power comes..."--heck, you can finish the rest of the sentence yourself) and patriotism. But just as in modern Hollywood, they've become a way to try to pump leftwing ideas into impressionable brains.

Imagine a WWII-era Captain America being anti-FDR? And for the record, I wouldn't have wanted to see a 1990s version of Batman or Superman being anti-Clinton, either: I think comic books should be a no-politics zone, focusing on basic ideas of right, wrong, and fighting bad guys, whether they're criminals, Nazis, or Islamofascist terrorists.

Of course, since so much of post-McGovern liberalism is "seeing beyond black and white concepts of good and evil and morality", it becomes (a) increasingly more difficult to write simple stories where superheroes battle bad guys and (b) increasingly easier to make bad guys more sympathetic. It's also easier to experiment with stuff that Saturday Night Live used to parody: back in 1979, they did "What if Superman was a Nazi" as a gag; last year, we saw Superman defending Saddam Hussein and fighting for Josef Stalin.