Free Republic

Dear Viewer, Thank you for your correspondence regarding the "South Park" episodes entitled "Cartoon Wars." We appreciate your concerns about censorship and the destructive influence of outside groups on the media, entertainment industry and particularly Comedy Central. To reiterate, as satirists, we believe that it is our First Amendment right to poke fun at any and all people, groups, organizations and religions and we will continue to defend that right. Our goal is to make people laugh and perhaps, if we're lucky, even make them think in the process. Comedy Central's belief in the First Amendment has not wavered, despite...

NEW YORK - Banned by Comedy Central from showing an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the creators of "South Park" skewered their own network for hypocrisy in the cartoon's most recent episode. The comedy — in an episode aired during Holy Week for Christians — instead featured an image of Jesus Christ defecating on President Bush and the American flag. In an elaborately constructed two-part episode of their Peabody Award-winning cartoon, "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker intended to comment on the controversy created by a Danish newspaper's publishing of caricatures of Muhammad. Muslims consider any physical...

Per a FoxNews Alert: New tape shows Zawahiri threatening attacks against the U.S. because of the Mohammed cartoons. Mention was made of "another 9-11, another Madrid." The tape appears to be authentic, according to Fox. No link yet.

Planned Exhibit of Cartoons Protested The caricatures of Muhammad will be displayed at a UCI student forum. Muslims object, and university officials are wary. By Daniel Yi, Times Staff Writer February 25 2006 Plans by a Republican student group at UC Irvine to showcase the controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that led to violent protests around the world are drawing condemnation from Muslim groups and university officials. The caricatures will be part of a panel discussion sponsored by the campus College Republicans scheduled for Tuesday at 7 p.m. in UCI's Crystal Cove Auditorium.

A wide range of panelists assembled Tuesday to discuss the wisdom and ethics of the decision to reprint a controversial cartoon in The Badger Herald last week. The cartoon, which depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, accompanied an 800-word editorial advocating the “sacred right” of freedom of speech. The cartoon’s original Sept. 2005 publication in a Danish newspaper continues to spur a heated reaction — sometimes violent — from Muslims worldwide. “I believe a newspaper, when possible, should give people the information they need to conduct intelligent, well-informed debate,” Mac VerStandig, editor in chief of...

Yahoo!Mail bans Allah and Dirty Harry handles By John Oates Monday 20th February 2006 16:27 GMT Yahoo! is banning the use of allah in email names - even if the letters are included within another name. This was uncovered by Reg reader Ed Callahan whose mother Linda Callahan was trying to sign up for a Verizon email address. She could not get it to accept her surname. Enquiries to Verizon revealed that a partnership with Yahoo! was to blame. Yahoo! will not accept any identies which include the letters "allah". Nor will Yahoo! accept yahoo, osama or binladen. But it...

Muslim computer-hacker gangs have launched a massive attack on Danish and Western Web sites as part of the mass protests across the Arab world over the publication of cartoons making fun of the Prophet Mohammed. The cyber-crime monitoring group Zone-H.org said in a statement that more than 1,000 Danish, Israeli and European sites were defaced or shut down by Islamic hackers in the last week. And experts fear that's just the beginning of what could be a massive cyber-jihad stretching from the Middle East and Europe to the United States and dominating cyberspace for weeks, costing millions of dollars. "We...

Last Tuesday, during or immediately after my appearance on Fox News Channel to discuss the Mohammed Cartoons, this blog was hit by a large, foreign-based denial of service attack. Last night, my hosting service notified me that it is receiving ongoing threats from individuals vowing to take down this site--and others along with it--which will presumably continue until I take down the cartoons. For now, we are on guard and continuing with business as usual. But you should know there's something much wider and deeper going on: I. Security Pro News reports on the latest Islamist hacker attacks spurred by...

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! That street corner cry of yesteryear is resonating at some European publications that have enjoyed a boom in sales and Web traffic after printing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that have stoked outrage across the Islamic world. Denmark's biggest-circulation broadsheet, Jyllands-Posten, triggered the controversy in September by publishing 12 cartoons of the prophet, including one showing his turban as a bomb. Its weekday circulation of about 154,000 hasn't moved much. But for newspapers in France and Norway that reprinted the drawings with much international ado, sometimes in defense of free speech, the caricatures have...

The Danish Islamic scholar who brought cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to the attention of Muslim leaders around the world says he was only trying to boost his campaign to get an apology from the Danish newspaper that first published them. INDEPTH: Muhammad cartoons: A timeline Danish Islamic scholar Ahmed Akkari, right, and Carsten Juste, editor in chief of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, which published cartoons depicting the Prophet, before a debate on Danish television, Sunday, Feb. 5. (AP Photo/POLFOTO, Carsten Snejbjerg) "I guess we took the illustrations to influential people so they could help," Ahmed Akkari told CBC News...

The editorial staff of the New York independent weekly NY Press have quit their jobs en masse after the paper's PTB decided that they were not going to publish the Danish cartoons which sparked the Global Cartoon Riots. Editor Harry Siegel, e-mailed the publishers on behalf of the staff, writing in part: New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons...

There's plenty of ignorance on all sides in the belatedly, incredibly (as in manipulatively incredible) mushrooming of protests against use of Mohammed as a cartoon figure in a Danish newspaper more than four months ago. Unfortunately, again for all sides, the controversy highlights a cultural rift (OK, chasm) that will not be easily bridged, if it can be at all. That's not defeatism, or at least is not intended as such. It's just an assessment of where a crazy world seems to stand amid what currently passes for a clash of civilizations with intolerant hotheads on both sides. How else...

The Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad last September, but the backlash from that has sparked renewed anger in the Islamic world — the latest being the burning of the Norwegian and Danish embassies in Syria. The roots of it all actually go back to Sept. 11, 2001, which created a highly charged environment where apparently, no subject is sacred in the West, especially topics related to Muslims and Islam. The embassy burnings are reminiscent of another controversy that brewed in 1988 and still simmers today. Salman Rushdie — then an obscure novelist of Muslim-Indian origin, wrote The...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - The Associated Press protested Wednesday the misleading inclusion of an AP photograph in a pamphlet purporting to show images offensive to Islam. The picture shows a bearded man wearing fake pig ears, a pig nose, and a pink embroidered cap on his head. He was wearing the costume while participating in a pig-squealing contest at an annual festival in a farm village in southern France last summer. The AP sent out the photo describing the pig-squealing contest on Aug. 14, 2005. The photo had no connection with Islam or the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published...

The article is from a source that cannot be quoted. But it is about Al Pimpton demanding an apology from "Boondocks" cartoon which depicted MLKing as using the "N" word. (The Left fights the Left?)

WE ARE ALL DANES NOW! Hindus consider it sacrilegious to eat meat from cows, so when a Danish supermarket ran a sale on beef and veal last fall, Hindus everywhere reacted with outrage. India recalled its ambassador to Copenhagen, and Danish flags were burned in Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. A Hindu mob in Sri Lanka severely beat two employees of a Danish-owned firm, and demonstrators in Nepal chanted: ''War on Denmark! Death to Denmark!"In many places, shops selling Dansk china or Lego toys were attacked by rioters, and two Danish embassies were firebombed. It didn't happen, of course. Hindus may...

UPDATED: The Cartoon War: A Collision of Values Filed under: General — site admin @ 8:19 am Nope, it’s not a “row.” It’s a war.At first take the name The Cartoon War may suggest something comic, exaggerated, or surreal. Those elements are in play– definitely in play. Cartoon and War are a collision, words that should not appear in the same serious sentence. They are a collision of values. But that’s the core of this, isn’t it? Likewise, the very real violence and anger add a heavy, instructive irony. The war between open and closed societies is not superficial,...

The controversy over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed is expanding, as more Muslims join the boycott and protests against Denmark and various European newspapers decide to publish the cartoons, mostly out of solidarity with Jyllands Posten and to make a strong political stand. One issue that puzzles many Danes is the timing of this outburst. The cartoons were published in September: Why have the protests erupted from Muslims worldwide only now? The person who knows the answer to this question is Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a man that the Washington Post has recently profiled as “one...

THE BOSTON GLOBE SAYS: "CARTOONISTS = NAZIS." Why won't the Boston Globe stand for the principle of free speech and show their support for the cartoonists whose lives are being threatened by Muslims demanding their beheading? Because the cartoonists are just like the Nazis, that's why! Or is it the Klan? Here, read this from Saturday's Boston Globe editorial page for yourself: "Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Ku Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims...

Last week, Muslims marched in the centre of London chanting "Freedom go to Hell!" There could be no more graphic illustration of the paradox at the heart of the cartoon row. These protesters were exercising - and in many cases abusing - the freedom of protest and freedom of assembly that are foundation stones of British democracy. Yet, even as they exploited these hard-won liberties, they were calling for them to be abolished. This newspaper would not have published the cartoons of Mohammed at the centre of this controversy, images which we regard as vulgar and fatuously insulting. But -...