This is a pretty funny cartoon, and as Professor Volokh points out, it shows how the whole “can’t show pictures of Mohammed” thing has descended into self parody.

So now, the perennially offended muslims are offended by a cartoon of which there’s no way to tell from the image itself whether it’s Mohammed or not–one can only tell from the context of the joke.

It reminds me of the story a few years ago about the bar in Colorado that had to stop selling teeshirts that depicted two aliens having s3x because they were too lewd for the town elders. I (and no doubt others) pointed out that if they were aliens, there was no way to tell whether or not the activity in which they were engaged was s3xu@l (sorry–I don’t want to get top-listed on google for the search “aliens s3x”). They could, for example, simply have been feeding each other, or communicating somehow. One occasional commenter here, in fact, emailed me at the time that it reminded him of the old “Life in Hell” strip when Binky (or one of the other one-eared rabbits) is being chastised for smoking, and he says “I’m not smoking–I’m sucking p00p through a straw.”

That’s the point to which this idiocy has devolved. Eugene is right:

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

Mark Steyn’s latest gem:

Quite how Britain’s Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that “blowup males” are one of Islam’s leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association’s complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy “insults the Prophet Muhammad — who also has the title al-Mustapha.”

In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don’t insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, “We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet’s name ‘Mustafa’ and the afflicted word ‘shag’ removed.”

If I were a Muslim, I’d be “hurt” and “humiliated” that the revered prophet’s name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet’s name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.

Yes. Where are all the protests about that?

An Egyptian muslim describes her culture:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It’s a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

There isn’t going to be a pretty end to this.

An Egyptian muslim describes her culture:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It’s a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

There isn’t going to be a pretty end to this.

An Egyptian muslim describes her culture:

Is it any surprise that after decades of indoctrination in a culture of hate, that people actually do hate? Arab society has created a system of relying on fear of a common enemy. It’s a system that has brought them much-needed unity, cohesion and compliance in a region ravaged by tribal feuds, instability, violence, and selfish corruption. So Arab leaders blame Jews and Christians rather than provide good schools, roads, hospitals, housing, jobs, or hope to their people.

For 30 years I lived inside this war zone of oppressive dictatorships and police states. Citizens competed to appease and glorify their dictators, but they looked the other way when Muslims tortured and terrorised other Muslims. I witnessed honour killings of girls, oppression of women, female genital mutilation, polygamy and its devastating effect on family relations. All of this is destroying the Muslim faith from within.

There isn’t going to be a pretty end to this.

Wretchard says that diplomacy won’t prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Not that this is news, but it’s useful to continue to point out to the naifs who fantasize otherwise.

This is probably the largest global crisis we’ve faced since the Cold War, and possibly since 1938, though it wasn’t recognized as that serious a crisis at the time. We will either have to accept the reality of a nuclear Iran (and a nuclear Iran run by mullahs, not by the Iranian people) or a war with Iran to prevent that, at whatever the cost. Neither option has a low cost, but at some point, I hope that the nation will recognize that the cost of the latter will be lower.

I’ve lived through most of the Cold War, when we grew up thinking that our nuclear incineration was almost inevitable, with duck and cover drills in elementary school, but in many ways, I fear the future now more than I have at any previous time in my life of half a century.

We are in for ugly times, not long from now, and the best we can hope for at this point is to minimize the horror, because we’ve allowed a new totalitarianism to grow, unhampered, for too long. Let us just hope that we can act sooner than Chamberlain did.

Syria accuses Israel of creating the bird flu:

An article published by the newspaper argues that Israel spread the virus in the Far East to mislead the world.

Yes, those Jews are quite tricky that way.

The newspaper backed its suspicions by citing a 1998 report in the Sunday Times that Israel is developing a biological

That’s what the head of Hezbollah says that President Bush and SecState Rice should do:

In Beirut, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah urged Muslims worldwide to keep demonstrating until there is an apology over the drawings and Europe passes laws forbidding insults to the prophet.

The head of the guerrilla group, which is backed by Iran and Syria, spoke before a mass Ashoura procession. Whipping up the crowds on the most solemn day for Shiites worldwide, Nasrallah declared:

“Defending the prophet should continue all over the world. Let Condoleezza Rice and Bush and all the tyrants shut up. We are an Islamic nation that cannot tolerate, be silent or be lax when they insult our prophet and sanctities.”

“We will uphold the messenger of God not only by our voices but also by our blood,” he told the crowds, estimated by organizers at about 700,000. Police had no final estimates but said the figure was likely to be even higher.

You know, people who talk about upholding things with their blood often get an opportunity to do so (and often futilely).

A long, but useful and timely (given our attempts to create new ones in seemingly unfertile soil) essay over at Public Review.

…that I’d live to see (and, well…hear) the day that a news announcer said the words, “…the cartoon death toll is up to nine.”

Only in an Islamist world.

[Wednesday morning update]

Judith Weiss says (yes, yes, I know…I was shocked, too) that these demonstrations are not spontaneous. And here’s more from the WSJ.

While there are people bleeding and dying in Iraq, this is, more than anything, a propaganda war. And unfortunately, our own press is largely, knowingly or not, working on the side of the enemy.

[Another update about 8:30 AM EST]

The problem is spreading to the strife-torn Midwest. Iowahawk (who’s been missing in action since Christmas) has the scoop:

…outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it — a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

“Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod,” said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you’re going to have a much calmer and more stable culture.”

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter — cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

[One more update]

Amir Tehari writes about the bonfire of the pieties.

[Update late morning]

Meryl Yourish notes some rhetorical slight of hand and subject changing at AP:

Notice how the AP explains why the cartoons are offensive to Muslims. They do not bother to explain a similarly important fact