My posting of the cartoons here is not an endorsement of their content. It's an attempt to actually report what the controversy is about, which can't be done in the absence of the original document.
The American media has been grossly negligent in their reporting of these cartoons by not reprinting them, and not linking to them in the online reports. Contrary to Fred Barnes's assertion on Hugh Hewitt's show, this is not to their credit, rather to their disgrace. Any informed opinion requires actual facts, and while even the grossest slurs don't justify embassy torchings and threats of violence, it would be nice to know just what set them off this time.
As WFB put it:
A quite natural curiosity attaches to how these twelve caricatures actually looked. One of them features Mohammed in a vaporous cloud addressing an assembly of suicide terrorists, with the caption that the heavenly kingdom has run out of virgins, so that aspirant debauchers simply have to lay off for a while. How was all that actually depicted by the cartoonist? Even the banal representation of Mohammed with a bomb replacing the turban on his head did not appear in the New York Times, the paper of record.The offending cartoons have to be imagined.
And the imagination is usually worse than the real thing.
When Powerline reproduced cartoons showing the Star of David as walls in a prion camp, nobody thought they were self-hating Jews. Likewise, the press in this country needs to find the nerve to tell the story - to do their jobs.
Lord knows, they've spent enough time telling us whose side they're not on.