Free Republic

WASHINGTON - The Secret Service (news - web sites) used "profoundly bad judgment" in seeking to question a Los Angeles Times cartoonist over a political cartoon depicting a man pointing a gun at President Bush (news - web sites), a senior House Republican said Tuesday.   Rep. Christopher Cox (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Secret Service owed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez an apology "and the public is owed an explanation both of how this happened and why it will not happen again." The use of "federal power to attempt to...

LONDON - The Israeli Embassy in London has sent a strongly worded letter of protest to The Independent, following an editorial cartoon yesterday by Dave Brown, depicting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon biting the flesh of a Palestinian baby. In the cartoon, Sharon says: "What's wrong? Have you never seen a politician kissing a baby?" The background shows Apache attack helicopters sending missiles from the cockpit with the message "Vote Likud." In her letter, Shuli Davidovich, the embassy's press secretary, writes: "As Britain commemorates National Holocaust Day, I am shocked that The Independent has chosen to evoke an ancient Jewish stereotype...

Yo, Muhammad, it was a joke! Hey, did you hear the one about Muhammad and …? No? Me neither. And even if I did hear a good Muhammad joke, you can bet I wouldn't tell it. Not in an e-mail, not in a column, not no way, not no how. Why? Because if you poke fun at the prophet of Islam -or even suggest anything that remotely smacks of irreverence -you will live (maybe) to regret it. Already, I feel the rumbling of thousands of creatively worded hate mails involving the word "donkey" as they thunder along my computer's routers....

A Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist is under fire from Muslims for his depiction of a Middle Eastern-looking man behind the steering wheel of a nuclear-bomb laden truck under the headline, "What would Muhammad drive?" The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim World League are demanding an apology from Doug Marlette's syndicator, Tribune Media Services, and from his employer, the Tallahassee Democrat. Cartoon by Doug Marlette, used with permission The cartoon shows a Ryder rental truck like the one used by convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. In a phone interview, Marlette told WorldNetDaily he would not apologize, though he...