Opinion cartoons truly certify the old maxim that the pen is mightier than the sword.
The Muslim rage, violence, mayhem and pillaging sweeping through the streets of several foreign nations purportedly because of a Danish newspaper's cartoons caricaturing Muhammad is perhaps the most excessive reaction ever seen to the art of lampooning.
Cartoonists have been challenged to duels and threatened. They've been sued. Nervous Nelly editors bowing to complaints have fired them. They've even helped shape national political policy and end wars.
I know something of the havoc a cartoon can wreak: I was temporarily fired as editor of the Phoenix morning newspaper some years back for all of a couple hours because I refused to suspend cartoonist Steve Benson, later a Pulitzer winner, whose cartoon about a politician had "embarrassed" the publisher with his friends. The publisher later thought better and "rehired" me.
Benson, whom I hired for his first newspaper job, had no compunction about poking fun at the foibles of religions -- although he had been a Mormon missionary in Japan and was the grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, the late leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"I don't aim to please. I just aim," Benson would say.
What has astonished me in this global controversy is that except for one or two newspapers, U.S. editors have declined to publish the controversial Muhammad cartoons -- although many have reprinted Arab cartoons caricaturing bloodthirsty, fanged Israelis drinking the blood of Arabs.
Here we are as a nation committed, with varying public support, to exporting democracy while guardians of cherished tenets of democracy -- freedom of speech and freedom of the press -- are shying away from showing their celebrated courage as journalists.
One can sympathize with Muslims in their rage about their religion being lampooned. But burning buildings and sacking a city?
U.S. editors who refused out of fear or religious sensitivity to publish the cartoons as a way of explaining what the fury is about have a lot of explaining to do about other cartoons they publish that surely show no sensitivity to domestic U.S. issues and personalities, including the Catholic Church pedophile scandal.
Bowing to government pressure is already taking its toll on American freedoms. The New York Times held up reports about secret eavesdropping for a year because President Bush asked it to remain silent. Google has bowed to mainland Chinese communists to censor out data read by their subjects.
Now, mobs torching foreign embassies by crazed protesters have finally cowered U.S. editors into submission in their decisions.
