Outrage Reprised

Darn those fellows with the funny bones, the tart intellects, the cartoonish bent. Don't they make us laugh. Aren't those editorial page cartoons worth looking forward to on a daily basis? Don't they sum up the absurdity of human nature? Aren't they cleverly waggish? Don't they make us do a double-take in realization of how lunatic is this world we have fashioned?

And aren't they living dangerously. Think of all those outraged letters-to-the-editor that occasionally blemish the editorial pages, from irate newspaper subscribers, when one of their sacred oxes has been gored. There are options: cease subscribing and thus confronting such excessive outrages that has most other people rolling in the aisles, or just shrug it off.

Unless. Except. If. But.

So here we go again. We have already experienced a paroxysm of fundamentally outraged Islamic revulsion against relatively mild cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammad. Not to be trifled with. The affront is too great, and the hysterical backlash becomes downright murderous.

To the unfortunate extent that 50 people died unnecessarily, a country that deserves better suffered grievous economic loss, and the divide between East and West, the secular-democratic world and the dogmatically Muslim world cracked even further apart.
And, sadly, the craven cowardice of many news organizations surrendered to the threat.

We're still smarting at the affront to our civil liberties, to the smothering of freedom of speech and expression. Although it's safe to say we've moved on. At least we thought we had. Denmark certainly has. Lesson learned, so we thought: one does not trifle with Muslim sensibilities. Nor give them too much credit for temperate thought.

Now though, Sweden has recklessly, intemperately stepped up to the pitch. And now it's a Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks - brave and silly man - who has launched a thousand spites down on his greying head. You'd think he'd know better. But no, off he goes and teases the hydra. Cut off one head, another grows to join the other hundred or so heads, all snapping, gnashing their ferocious jaws.

Courageous Defender of Islam, aka leader of the Islamic State in Iraq, that kindly head of that religious charity, is now offering $100,000 for the murder of Mr. Vilks. Oh, with an additional $50,000 thrown in for good will if the murder is well accomplished, which is to say "If he were to be slaughtered like a lamb." However that is.

Whoops, we're not finished, not quite. Another $50,000 for the well-deserved killing of the editor of the newspaper that published the drawing by Lars Vilks of the Prophet sporting the head of a dog. Dog lovers of the world unite! We are outraged at the taking of such unwarranted liberties. Dogs deserve better.

It is mankind that is unclean in its habitude.