For some reason, I thought one of the other Monitor Duty contributors had written something about the Danish cartoons of Mohammed and the riots, so I hadn’t written about it. My apologies to everyone for neglecting this issue that is so relevant to the freedom of speech, freedom of the press and, oh yeah, the right of cartoonists to continue breathing.

I’m sure there isn’t anyone who isn’t at least partly aware of what this is all about, but just to keep the facts straight I’m going to recap:

This all started when someone in Denmark wanted to do a children’s book about Muhammed but they couldn’t find anyone willing to illustrate it, fearing that radical Muslims would come after them for drawing an image of Muhammed. Worrying that the chill wind of self-censorship was taking hold in Denmark, a newspaper, the JyllandsPosten, asked their cartoonists to all submit cartoons of Muhammed. Only 12 were willing to take them up on the offer.

The 12 cartoons (SEE THEM ONLINE) were run in the pages of JyllandsPosten on September 30, 2005. Note the date. Hardly anyone in America is mentioning that these cartoons were printed four months before the riots about them started.

The reason for the delay is that the riots are being ginned up by a Danish Muslim group which has traveled the Muslim world seeking government support for riots and spreading handouts of the cartoons which have been falsified to include images which were not part of JyllandsPosten’s run. The images are a more inciteful cartoon, an image of a man with a pig’s nose, and an image of Muhammed having sex with an animal. Amir Taheri’s article investigating the source of these riots, who engineered them and all of the political orchestration behind them is must reading.

This is both maddening and it gives us hope, and you’d probably be surprised at my reasons why.

What is hopeful is that MOST of the Muslim world is NOT up in arms about the cartoons, and the ones that are had to essentially rent their mobs. Hope can also be drawn from the fact that these toon riots are not happening in certain recently-freed republic Muslim countries.

What is maddening is that 99.9% of American papers and 100% of the TV news will not run the cartoons, neither in a move of “freedom of the press” solidarity nor from their value as very relevant news that we need to know.