Feardom of the press

British foreign secretary Jack Straw has commended the British press for its "sensitivity" in not publishing the cartoons that originally appearred in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten.

"There is freedom of speech, we all respect that, but there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory," Mr Straw said after talks with the Sudanese foreign minister.

"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.

"There are taboos in every religion. We have to be very careful about showing the proper respect in this situation."

The Boston Globe has hastened to follow Mr. Straw's advice—going so far, in fact, as to compare the Danish cartoonists to Nazis and Klansmen: "Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims," write The Globes' editors, "than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Ku Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims of intolerance. That is why the Danish cartoons will not be reproduced on these pages."

CNN, NBC, CBS and The Los Angeles Times have elected to follow The Globe's lead. To their credit, the editors of the L. A. Times note, alluding to Voltaire, that "it is not necessary to agree with these cartoons to defend another's right to publish them."

For the most part, however, editors at most liberal-leaning newspapers—including The New York Times and The Washinton Post—are steering their editorial pages clear of the controversy that dominates their news sections. (The left-wing blogosphere is oddly silent too, perhaps because the President, whose every affirmative statement must be resisted to the death, doesn't seem to have a dog in the game.)

The reason most often adduced for this restaint is that the media are doing so "out of respect for the Muslim faith." But, as Mark Steyn points out, what they really mean is "out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage."

Against the backdrop of all this sensitivity and restraint, another Danish embassy has been firebombed and an insurgent group in Iraq has promised death to any Dane it encounters: "We swear to God, if we catch one of their citizens in Iraq, we will cut him to pieces, to take revenge for prophet."

And so, through a combination of outward threat and inward restraint, the West bends its centuries-old tradition of press freedom to conform to the strictures of sharia law.

NOTE: Those wishing to sign a petition in support of the Danish cartoonists may do so here. Hat tip: TIWIT reader Holger.

(Cartoon courtesy of Dr. Rusty Shackleford's The Jawa Report.)

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has an important new post on the three fabricated cartoons that seem to have been responsible for much of the Muslim anger toward Jyllands-Posten. GatewayPundit, meanwhile, has an in-depth profile of Danish imam Ahmad Abu Laban, who has emerged as the chief architect of the Muslim protests. "We love bin Laden, we love Saddam Hussein, and anyone who is willing to destroy the U.S.," Abu Laban told by The Jerusalem Post in 2002. "And I'm not the only one here who thinks like this. The whole refugee camp shares my views and everyone supports bin Laden."

As I've argued previously, the original 12 cartoons are pretty tame stuff—even by Muslim standards—and little more than a pretext for a campaign of anger against the West that Islamists like Abu Laban have been working to ignite for some time now.