The cartoons were published in September 2005, but they didn’t make international news until the next year, when a group of Danish imams went on a world tour to drum up Muslim anger against Denmark. The imams brought three additional cartoons along with the original dozen. Those three additions, which hadn’t been published in Denmark or anywhere else, were grotesque, including one showing Muhammad having sex with a dog. They were the imams’ own handiwork, added to the bundle in case the Jyllands-Posten efforts didn’t achieve the desired response. Up until that moment, the phrase cartoon violence had summoned to mind images no more harmful than Wile E. Coyote fighting the Road Runner. But after the imam tour in the spring of 2006, more than 100 people died in purportedly spontaneous riots against the cartoons. Half a dozen terrorist plots to avenge the artwork were uncovered across Europe. Demagogic governments from Tehran to Damascus seized the opportunity to deflect attention away from their own problems.
Every newspaper and TV station in the Western world covered the story of the riots, but almost none of them showed the original cartoons themselves. The media’s self-censorship was based on the same fear exhibited by Denmark’s illustrators. As a journalist, I was appalled by this cowardice masquerading as sensitivity. Western Standard editor Kevin Libin and I knew our readers would be interested in this story and would want to see for themselves what all the fuss was about.
As our publication date drew nearer, we couldn’t help noticing that no other mainstream publication in Canada was planning to reprint the cartoons. We’d be the first, and possibly only, one. We sent the magazine to our printers on Friday, February 10, for printing over the weekend. The next day, word of the deed somehow leaked. By Sunday our decision had become national news, even though no one except our staff and our printers had seen the spread.
If you think Obama's deep curtsey to King Abdullah was a disgusting display, catch the surrender-monkey Canadian version of how Liberal Fascism is eroding that country's right to call itself a democracy by reading the rest of the Reason article linked above.
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