Over at pretentiousblowhard.org, Graham has been doing some fine blogging about what I've been calling the "Islamocomic controversy."

The trouble started back in September, when the Danish Jyllands-Posten, responding to an author's complaint that no one would illustrate his book about Muhammad because of an Islamic prohibition against depicting the prophet, solicited drawings. You can find the published ones here.

I can't read Danish (though it is tantalizingly close to German) but the copy editor in me feels compelled to point out that, contrary to almost all reports, the Jyllands-Posten did not publish "twelve cartoons of the prophet Muhammad." At least three of the comics don't feature him at all.

The ones that do, especially the three that show Muhammad in a negative light, are what sparked the initial outcry, which Reason wrote about in November:

Artists and editors received death threats; the embassies of several Muslim countries lodged a complaint with Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (who refused to meet with them "because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so"); and 5,000 Muslims protested in the streets of Copenhagen.

The controversy seems to have only snowballed since. There have been violent protests in the Middle East and calls for censorship from all over the world, usually pitched as a defense of religious dignity against the forces of unbridled free expression.

I've commented quite a bit about this on Graham's site, as it touches on both my atheism (Islam is the craziest of the three major monotheistic religions) and, much more importantly, my support for freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas.

I sincerely wish that more of the cartoons had actually been good, or funny (one of the best — not one of the offensive drawings — neatly exploited the Danish editors' ignorance of Arabic to mock the newspaper itself), but even the right to make bad art in poor taste deserves to be defended.

As Graham so adroitly put it earlier today: "Hell, I'd fight in a war caused by cartoons. Finally something worth dying for, you know?"