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AMMAN (AFP) - A Jordanian tabloid editor has been arrested after his newspaper published controversial cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, while an investigation was launched into a second weekly newspaper that also printed the cartoons, a judicial source said.

The Jordanian newspapers came under fire after being the only Arab-based publications to reprint the caricatures, which have sparked protests and anger in the Muslim world.

Several media outlets throughout Europe, where there is a large Muslim population at hand, have published the cartoons: Die Welt in Germany, France Soir in France, 2 Jordanian newspapers, the BBC, Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain, a newspaper in Ireland, a handful of others. Several of the editors who made the decision to publish have been fired, and all have received death threats.

In the United States, only the Philadelphia Inquirer has published any of the cartoons — and that with carefully drawn caveats explaining that, really, it's wretched stuff and we're printing it only so that our readers know what all the fuss is about.

Where, pray, are America's stout-hearted defenders of a free press now, when it actually matters? When European newspaper editors are placing their very lives in danger to report the story? When they could help to mobilize the world's political leadership to defend the free press at virtually no risk to themselves?

Why ... the editors who defend the right to publish cartoons portraying Secretary of State Rice as Aunt Jemima are simpering about the bad taste of the cartoons and refusing to soil their opinion pages with such disrespectful stuff.

Theocratic repression is winning and, evidently, much of the Western press is willing to let it win without a fight. What sort of world are we going to live in when ignorant, superstitious mobs decide what may and may not be discussed in public?

The fracas du jour is confined largely to Europe and the Middle East, but freedom of the press is not a strictly European matter; we must inevitably feel the effects of the press' cowardice — or is it decadence? — here, too.

The loopier elements amongst conservative evangelicals routinely try to suppress disrespectful commentary in this country. What will editors do when, for the first time ever and as a matter of indisputable public record, bona fide pests such as Donald Wildmon are able to point to this sorry episode and say "Our insane superstitions deserve the same respectful treatment that Islam's insane superstitions get?"

They'll gulp and fold, in the name of "fairness." And, once again, ignorance and superstition and the malice of mystics will be in the saddle.

Bob Felton
www.CivilCommotion.com
The Intersection of Religion, Law, and Politics