On Freedom of the Press (a diversion from the real estate biz)

The following article was found at the Columbia Journalism Review. Click the Link for the entire article...

I Was a Tool of Satan
An Equal-Opportunity Offender Maps the Dark Turn of Intolerance
BY DOUG MARLETTE

Last year, I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. The caption read, "What Would Mohammed Drive?" Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. The cartoon's main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Predictably, the Shiite hit the fan.

Can you say "fatwa"?

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And more from Marlette...

Them damn pictures
By caving in to fanatics over the Danish cartoons, the West has shown that it is not only gutless but brainless.

Feb. 24, 2006 "Give up the cartoonists; they're in the attic." That is what many of us in the trade feel has been our lot since our brethren in Denmark were forced into hiding after drawing likenesses of the Prophet Mohammed. As art will do, "them damn pictures"-- Boss Tweed's term for Thomas Nast's cartoons from a more innocent time -- have exposed not just the internal dynamics of what some have called Islamofascism but the corresponding corruption of our own values and character in the West. Our insides have been illuminated like an electrocuted Daffy Duck in an old Warner Brothers cartoon. And we now see what we're made of: not a lot of guts, or brains either.