Cartoon News you can use – UPDATED

Vaughn Ververs at CBS’ Public Eye has a well-written and strong piece up examining the mainstream media’s reluctance to print the “offensive” cartoons even though a story this huge sort of demands it:

“…All of which brings us to the role of Western media, specifically U.S. media, in this face-off. Often lost in discussing this story is the fact that the cartoons were originally printed in a Danish newspaper some five months ago (conspiracy theories are currently raging as to why they’ve suddenly become a flashpoint but that’s for another time). Since the initial protests last week, many news outlets in Europe have re-published or aired the drawings in support of freedom of speech, which has resulted in more outrage among Muslims.

So far, almost every U.S. news outlet has refrained from following suit. […]

It’s a responsible position to withhold images that offend common sensibilities and exist only to degrade or inspire action against a particular group. But when those images become the basis for a major global story, it becomes less defensible. Add in the availability of access to the drawings on the Internet and the refusal on the part of major media outlets to recreate the images starts looking like a head-in-the-sand exercise.
[…]

Perhaps part of the reason the U.S. media is reluctant to show them is because most of us would scratch our heads in disbelief over how they could possibly spark such violence. Just about any group or belief you can imagine – Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks, Men, Women and even Canadians – are treated much worse. And so ingrained is the freedom of expression, that it’s generally tolerated, even celebrated at times. When Christians are subjected to images like “Piss Christ,” why, we would ask, should Muslims be exempt? Why should the American press have a separate standard of religious sensitivity? Is the American press actually more scared of being targeted by protests or violence than they admit?

This is your must-read of the day. It is lucid, well thought-out and it when you’re feeling fed-up with the press, it gives hope. Pieces like this are why Public Eye is in my blogroll, and why I’m usually so happy to link to them. It may be the last legitimate gem in the former “Tiffany” network’s rather tarnished crown.

Iraq the Model breaks silence:

I give up! I have to comment on the general situation…
I swear that 90%+ of the protestors in Muslim countries have not seen the cartoons and do not know the name of the paper and when I say that I’m sure of it because I have access to the web 24/7 and I spent a really long time searching for the cartoons and couldn’t find them until a friend emailed me a link and.

You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

Omar thinks if anyone is expecting apologies to soothe things over, they are sadly deluded.

And since Gateway Pundit is now reporting that EGYPT published these cartoons 5 months ago, I suspect he is correct. This whole “event” has been nothing but a champertous contrivance. See Freedom for Egyptians.

Dr. Sanity writes on a sense of humor and what it requires, and what it says about you, if you cannot laugh at yourself. A very good read:

The healthiest kind of humor is the kind that allows an outlet for pain and at the same time gives pleasure. It deflates without destroying; and exposes our pretensions before they are taken too seriously. The painful feelings that often underlie humor if expressed another way would be destructive or eat away at the soul. In this way, humor can be as redemptive as the most creative artistic endeavor.

Jonah Goldberg reports on unrest in the Jewish street.

Victoria gets thoughtful rather than angry

The freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to say what you want without a reaction. It just guarantees your right to reasonable expressions of thought.

Spengler wonders Why can’t Muslims Take a Joke? (Fedora Tip to Roger Simon).

More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream American media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more dangerous material previously available. Newsweek’s “Challenging the Koran” story of July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine’s website. The government of Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German philologist’s contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than classical Arabic, translating the “virgins” of Paradise as “raisins”. As I observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western media have steered clear of the subject.

That’s news to me, and troubling. Very troubling, indeed.

Shrinkwrapped has a post taking a very broad view of the situation, connecting the cartoon story to the re-examination of Saddam and his WMD, which a story flying way under the radar, and Dymphna’s post on the tremble of Iran. I’m actually surprised that he didn’t also link to this piece on Hamas by neo-neocon.

Thomas Sowell suggests we are drifting toward a point of no return.

Barcepundit remembers when Sinead O’ Connor went too far and doesn’t recall boycotts of Guinness or riots in the street.

Don’t forget about the Twelfth Imam.

Michelle Malkin is being called a bigot, etc, again because she is unapologetic and direct. She links to (and excerpts) a particularly adolescent article which would like to, apparently, blame the blogs for unrest and deaths, and which is oooooohhhhh soooooo klever when it uses the phrase “Kartoon Karnage Kapers,” because, you know…Michelle is a conservative, so she must be the equivalent of the KKK. And liberals accuse conservatives of “writing in code!” What a punk. Writes Michelle:

You show me one ounce of glee expressed on this website over the conflagration, and I’ll show you one ounce of genuine, unqualifed concern expressed by Ms. Zerbisias over the senseless Cartoon Jihad bloodshed of victims such as Father Santoro.

Michelle is a petite woman with enormous shoulders and boundless courage. She and I differ now and again in method or message, but I have enormous respect for her energy, her committment, her spine-of-steel, her forthrightness and her generosity. This is crap up with which she should not have to put. But then again…she’s not exactly putting up with it, she’s giving it right back, in spades! :-) Iowa Voice is angry about the piece, too.

Check back – I’ll likely be adding more links before the end of the evening! :-)