Not Another Image of Muhammad!

That's right. It's not.

Andrew Kantor, who writes on technology for USA Today, had provided large, clear reproductions of the Muhammad images from the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, but he has now taken them down with an explanation here. The images can still be viewed at Human Events Online. I'm posting here the image by Lars Refn that you see in the right-hand corner because it's not Muhammad the Prophet of Islam.

That irony seems to have been lost of the imams who toured the Middle East showing the 'twelve' images of Muhammad from the Jyllands-Posten.

Or they didn't care.

Fortunately, someone else did care enough to point this out, along with commentary on the artist's putative cowardice, and paste this on the cartoon's blackboard:

Lars Refn's drawing did not feature "the Prophet" but a Danish schoolboy, Mohammad, who wrote on the blackboard in Persian: "Jyllands-Posten's journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs."

We think Lars Refn is a coward, who does not understand the seriousness of the Muslim threat to free speech.

I don't agree that Refn is a coward and have no opinion on his supposed lack of seriousness concerning free speech. The cartoon simply provides too little evidence for me to infer that much.

What interests me here is that whatever Refn's original intentions, and despite his not having depicted Muhammad the Prophet of Islam, he's now been lumped with eleven others as one who has committed 'blasphemy' by drawing an image of Muhammad.

However, through free speech -- the open posting of the images -- someone noticed that Refn's Muhammad was not the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, just as someone else noticed that the pig-snouted Muhammad that was not one of the twelve Jyllands-Posten depictions was also not Muhammad, and just as someone else noticed that despite what the imams say about Islam not allowing depictions of Muhammad, Muslims themselves have very often done precisely that.

Without free speech, we wouldn't know all these things. Support free speech.