An excellent and timely cartoon

The CNN.com web site, a mainstay of my blogging day, has links to several political cartoonists, including Bill Mitchell, whose work is now available only via the Internet. A recent (2006-02-08) cartoon addresses the worldwide furor over the Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم).

I highly recommend you follow the link and see Mitchell's cartoon yourself, but I'll give you a synopsis. A wild-eyed madman with a lit bomb on his head is screaming, "Death to cartoonists!" The cartoonist as narrator explains, "This is not an image of the Prophet Mohammed, this is an image of a crazed Islamist, denigrating the image of peaceful Muslims everywhere..."

Exactly. A cartoon depicting the Prophet as a lunatic does far less damage to Islam, and far less dishonor to Muhammad and Allah, than an actual lunatic advocating — or, worse yet, carrying out — acts of violence against innocent Danes, Norwegians, or others, because of that cartoon.

If you feel that a cartoon is blasphemous, then by all means speak out against it. But when you take your condemnation into the sphere of physical violence, it is you who defiles the memory of your beloved Prophet.