Newspapers Refuse to Print Cartoon That Satirizes Radical Islam

Growing up, my favorite comic strip was "Bloom County" by Berkeley Breathed. It offered a hilarious social commentary during its 1980-89 run. Breathed now has a comic strip called "Opus," which I stumbled upon today when thumbing through a newspaper over a latte at Starbucks. That led me to looking up these comic strips on Wikipedia, which in turn led me to discovering a news story from this past August.

It seems that several newspapers refused to run the August 26 Opus strip because a character decides she wants to become a radical Islamist...and goes on to explain why. One frame of the strip is above, but you can see the whole comic here.

Newsflash: We're at WAR with radical Islam. If the country had been scared to satirize Nazis during World War II, we might have found ourselves speaking German today. And when we did poke fun at the enemy, we weren't implicating every German, just as poking fun at fundamentalists doesn't denigrate moderate Muslims.

These newspapers were likely afraid to set off riots in the form of those in Europe and across the world during the Mohammed cartoon controversy (which resulted in over 100 deaths). I must wonder if the same sensitivity would have been exercised if the comic strip had satirized radical Christians or Jews...because you must be careful about rioting rabbis.