It turns out, by the way, that this sketch had already been done by the Canadians. (And done better, I might add.) But hey, this is show business, right? Outright theft of material is the sincerest form of flattery.

That’s not the problem. Like many “Saturday Night Live” sketches, this one has a promising premise—a Pictionary-style game show in which the contestants are asked to draw “the prophet Mohammed”—but it goes nowhere. And the reason it goes nowhere is because it doesn’t have the courage to go anywhere.

The basic point of the sketch, which it draws out for more than four minutes, is that people are terrified of drawing Mohammed. Well, we already knew that. And the basic problem is that this fact is not funny. It is too painfully true.

This highlights one of the subtler problems with the [leftist media] response as the “cartoon jihad” comes to our shores. The non-subtle problem is the commentators who outright oppose the publishing of the cartoons and have openly given up on free speech. That’s a phenomenon I have already written about, and the Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple offers his own excellent round-up of “The Week That Cable News Failed Free Expression.” The only problem is that he limits himself to cable news, when the print and online media were furnishing plenty of other examples, from the New York Times to Bloomberg to the Washington Post itself.

Yet the subtler problem is with those who agree that the Mohammed cartoons are free speech and should be protected, and who want to express how much it makes them sad that someone would kill over a drawing—but who won’t even show us the drawings that the controversy is all about. They have decided that this is one controversy in which the public shouldn’t be encouraged to see the evidence and judge for themselves. This is one “provocative” issue on which they don’t really want to provoke anyone. So sure, they want to indicate their disapproval of a lethal prohibition on drawing Mohammed—but without doing anything to actually defy or weaken that prohibition.

That’s what gives these comments, like the “Saturday Night Live” sketch, the hollow feeling of a statement that doesn’t really state anything.

Do you want to take a stand in favor of free speech? Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to draw Mohammed. Or if you don’t possess that particular skill (and I sure don’t), then publish some of the cartoons that started this controversy.

Nearly a decade ago, after the first “cartoon jihad,” I argued for why this is necessary:

This is not merely a symbolic expression of support; it is a practical countermeasure against censorship. Censorship—especially the violent, anarchic type threatened by Muslim fanatics—is effective only when it can isolate a specific victim, making him feel as if he alone bears the brunt of the danger. What intimidates an artist or writer is not simply some Arab fanatic in the street carrying a placard that reads “Behead those who insult Islam.” What intimidates him is the feeling that, when the beheaders come after him, he will be on his own, with no allies or defenders—that everyone else will be too cowardly to stick their necks out.

The answer, for publishers, is to tell the Muslim fanatics that they can’t single out any one author, or artist, or publication. The answer is to show that we’re all united in defying the fanatics.

That’s what it means to show “solidarity” by re-publishing the cartoons. The message we need to send is: if you want to kill anyone who publishes those cartoons, or anyone who makes cartoons of Mohammed, then you’re going to have to kill us all. If you make war on one independent mind, you’re making war on all of us. And we’ll fight back.

So I was happy to see this same point reiterated recently by Mark Steyn:

[N]o cartoonist or publisher or editor should have to stand alone. The minute there were multimillion-dollar bounties on those cartoonists’ heads, The Times of London and Le Monde and The Washington Post and all the rest should have said, “This Thursday we’re all publishing the cartoons. If you want to put bounties on all our heads, you’d better have a great credit line at the Bank of Jihad. If you want to kill us, you’ll have to kill us all…”

Steyn, of course, has the courage of his convictions, so he includes an image of Bosch Fawstin’s winning cartoon from the Garland contest.

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