In February, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times wrote a striking piece on the Danish cartoons, “A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery.” He recalled how the Catholic League protested the 1999 “Sensation” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that featured a “collage of the Virgin Mary with cutouts from pornographic magazines and shellacked clumps of elephant dung.” But in contrast to irate Muslims, he noted, “No protester torched the museum or called for beheading anybody.”
All of this was very interesting, but what really caught our eye was the reproduction of the insulting Virgin Mary portrait on the same page as the article. The New York Times, like most of the media, did not print the Danish cartoons. This makes us wonder: What must we do to persuade these guys to treat us as fairly as Muslims without threatening to behead them? In any event, we promise to be good.
