Loony Toons

From Investors Business Daily:

Media: On June 28, 1914, Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was gunned down in Sarajevo, Bosnia — a terrorist act that started WWI. Could the trigger for another global conflagration this time be a cartoonist's pen?

Ridiculous? Not if a gathering of 76 ambassadors from 76 nations, all summoned to a U-shaped table by the Danish prime minister, means anything. The hastily-called meeting was but one of a multiplicity of scenes taking place across the globe over the past two days.

Palestinians rioting. Indonesians angrily marching. Editors in Jordan and France sacked by wussy publishers. More European editors defying censorious Islam. American editorial boards deliberating over what's "insensitive."

If you've been asleep, all this uproar has to do with various European cartoonists' depictions of the prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. In Islamic orthodoxy, as most of the world has learned over the past few days, any such graphic depiction is considered blasphemy. It's the depiction, stupid. Not the terrorism.

While the controversy brought to a head the long-anticipated clash of civilizations, it also caught some Western commentators flat-footed. Was the right response to cheer the cartoonists, as IBD did in its Friday editorial? Or to douse the incendiary nature of this comic art?

Some high-minded European politicians, operating on the polite refusal to offend others' beliefs, frowned at the cartoonists' behavior. By contrast, most European journalists stiffened their spines. From Denmark, where the first of the offending caricatures was published, to the former Moorish empire of Iberia, newspapers showed their solidarity by reprinting the images.

We were surprised a little by the reactions of some hawkish commentators who seemed to rue the explosion of comic art. Suddenly, they seemed to imply, the West was the provocateur.

Skipping from 1914 to the 1930s, we wonder if Winston Churchill, then in his "wilderness years" and warning of Hitler's rise, would have thought so. Churchill felt no compunction about provoking the German chancellor's followers as "the Hun."

Britain's great wartime leader served the cause of clarity, and if there are gods of clarity we need them now. So far we've noticed no Western commentators attacked for such a casual reference to the deity. And we've noticed no Orthodox Jews rioting because said commentators actually pronounced the word "G-d," such an utterance being as taboo as an image of Muhammad.

Western civilization has had its bouts over these issues. Did Michelangelo create a "graven image" when he famously depicted the Christian Creator? Did Albrecht Durer and so many other artists whose works grace the great museums of Europe and America? It's a consensus that they're home free. Down the hall in some of those museums you may also find depictions of Jesus Christ submerged in urine and his mother smeared in elephant feces.
To Islamists such blasphemies signal weakness. If those diplomats seated at the U-table somehow decree that cartoonists refrain from offending Muhammad, then the Islamists will have diagnosed us correctly.

Somehow we suspect the civilization of Dore, Goya, Daumier and Hogarth will prevail, Islam at last making its own peace with artistic freedom. Europe's cartoonists and their journalistic defenders have discovered their own vital signs — even if European politicians and American worrywarts have not.

Clearly, we may have to fight.