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Moderate Muslims must “abandon the illusion that they can placate the Islamists by straddling the fence.” At least that was the position taken by The New York Times editorial page on Saturday. It’s pretty good advice for members of a faith going through some very serious identity searching. It’s advice The Times – along with the vast majority of the U.S. media – refuses to take itself.

The editorial, you see, was urging “moderate” Muslims to help quiet the furor in the Islamic world over those Danish cartoons that have caused so much violence and destruction. Of course The Times joins every major media outlet (including CBS News) in refusing to show those very cartoons, a fact that makes this editorial position almost laughable. The Times starts out strong:

With every new riot over the Danish cartoons, it becomes clearer that the protests are no longer about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, but about the demagoguery of Islamic extremists. The demonstrators are undeniably outraged by what they perceive as blasphemy. But radical Islamists are trying to harness that indignation to their political goals and their theocratic ends by fomenting hatred for the West and for moderate regimes in the Muslim world. These are dangerous games, and they require the most resolute response.

It then ventures into the surreal, noting that 11 journalists in 5 Muslim countries have been arrested for printing the cartoons:

In most of these cases, the legal action represents attempts by cowed authorities to appease the Islamists. But the effect -- in Yemen, Jordan and other countries -- has only been to give extremists a dollop of legitimacy, and to encourage them to turn up the heat.

Replace “legal action” with “refusal to show the images” and “cowed authorities” with “a cowed free press” and you see how twisted this position has become. No mention of how these moderate Muslims should feel about trying to explain images The Times won’t even print because they are viewed as too inflammatory. It’s one thing for them to risk arrest and prosecution (or worse), but we don’t need any trouble for our own press thank you very much. The longer this self-censorship-in-the-name-of-tolerance attitude goes on, the sillier it seems.

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It seems that the cartoon wars are now spreading to college campuses. According to the Chicago Tribune:

The editor in chief of a student-led newspaper serving the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been suspended after printing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that, when published in Europe, enraged Muslims and led to violent protests in the Middle East and Asia.

Editor Acton Gorton and his opinions editor, Chuck Prochaska, were relieved of their duties at The Daily Illini on Tuesday while a task force investigates "the internal decision-making and communication" that led to the publishing of the cartoons, according to a statement by the newspaper's publisher and general manager, Mary Cory.

Gorton said he expects to be fired at the conclusion of the investigation, which is expected to take two weeks.

"I pretty much have an idea how this is going to run, and this is a thinly veiled attempt to remove me from my position," said Gorton, a U. of I. senior who took the newspaper's helm Jan. 1. "I am feeling very betrayed, and I feel like the people who I thought were my friends and supporters didn't back me up."

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports:

A conservative student newspaper at Harvard University has become one of the few media outlets in the country to show inflammatory Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, angering students on campus and prompting a forum to discuss the controversy.

More:

Travis R. Kavulla, a junior and the editor of the paper, said the student journalists meant no disrespect to Muslims, and had hoped instead to provoke a debate on campus. ''Now that [the cartoons] have provoked such a firestorm around the world, it's a shame that the mainstream media isn't publishing them because many people don't understand what they look like," he said.

Traditionally, college campuses have functioned as sanctuaries for discussion and debate on a wide variety of controversial issues and topics. At a time when even news organizations choosing not to run the cartoons assert their right to do so if they wished, should editors of campus newspapers be punished for doing just that?

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In a interview on the “Evening News” last night (which can be seen in full on the Web), CBS anchor Bob Schieffer talks with Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, about the spreading violence in the Muslim world over a series of cartoons published in European newspapers depicting the Prophet Muhammad – something forbidden in Islam. Day by day, the violence has grown and increasingly the anger is being directed toward the United States, which has not been a part of the story to this point.

Almost every close observer of the situation will say there is more to the outrage sparked by the cartoons than just the drawings themselves, that it is part of a larger feeling of disrespect felt throughout the Muslim world. That may be the case, but the cartoon story is a prime example of the dynamic that has shaped our world for the past five years and will likely continue to dominate it for the foreseeable future.

Whether or not you want to characterize the conflict as a “clash or civilizations” or not strikes me as a semantic argument because there’s no denying the cultural differences at odds here that make the challenges of discussing almost anything – from politics to individual rights to economics – seem almost insurmountable at times. As Mr. Ahmed tells Schieffer in their discussion over the cartoon issue, it’s a “classic confrontation” between “an immovable object and an irresistible force.”

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You may have forgotten about it for a few beer and pizza filled hours yesterday, but this cartoon kerfuffle ain't going away anytime soon. (In case you've been busy checking betting lines: Many Muslims are up in arms over cartoons originally printed in a Danish newspaper featuring Prophet Muhammad. Islamic tradition forbids even respectful depictions of the prophet, which these were most definitely not.)



The latest news includes reports about thousands of "rampaging" Muslims setting fire to the Danish mission in Beirut, four deaths in demonstrations in Afghanistan, protesters calling for the killing of anyone who insults Muhammad in Iraq, shops, businesses and schools shutting down in protest in Kashmir, and…well, the list goes on and on.



The issue now being debated is whether or not news outlets should show the cartoons in their stories on the controversy. Virtually all American newspapers have chosen not to, although the Philadelphia Inquirer did publish one of the cartoons on Saturday, with a note explaining the reason for doing so.



"We're running this in order to give people a perspective of what the controversy's about, not to titillate, and we have done that with a whole wide range of images throughout our history," Inquirer editor Amanda Bennett told the Associated Press. She added that "there's a news reason to run it."



At CBS News, the decision was made not to run the cartoons. "We could explain it, so we didn't need to show it," says Linda Mason, CBS News senior vice president, standards and special projects, who compares the decision to one not to show dead soldiers. "Any rendering of Muhammad is an insult to Muslims, and desecration is even worse," she says, adding that the decision was made out of a desire not to unnecessarily offend, not because of the demonstrations or "out of fear of retribution."



On CBSNews.com, a photo appeared featuring a man holding a newspaper that contained an image of the cartoon. Mike Sims, director of news and operations at CBSNews.com, quickly ordered it taken off the site. "You could not read the cartoon, but I even thought [what was there] was too much," he says. "I think we've proven we can tell the story without offending Muslims."



If you believe there's a "news reason" to run the cartoons, as Bennett says, you're in a tough position: You can't report the full story without showing the pictures, and you can't show the pictures without offending (and possibly inflaming) Muslims. A related issue: These cartoons aren't exactly hard to find if you want to see them, thanks to the Internet. Is that a reason to run them – or not to?

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As the newspaper industry’s dismal financial outlook results in more downsizing at papers across the country, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists has christened today as “Black Ink Monday,” a “nonviolent protest” in the form of a collection of 100 cartoons at EditorialCartoonists.com. The protest is a response to “the Tribune Company's recent elimination of editorial cartooning positions at several of its newspapers, as well as a commentary on newspapers everywhere who have lost sight of the value of having a staff editorial cartoonist” (hat tip to News Dissector and E&P).

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