Cartoons making fun of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in a Danish newspaper last September are suddenly one of the hottest issues in international politics. Muslims in Europe and across the Middle East have been holding protests with growing levels of violence and now loss of life. If Muslim organisations want to protest and boycott Danish goods, they’re acting in accordance with their rights.

The pictures, one of which showed the prophet with a bomb on his head, violate a common belief among Muslims that any depiction of Muhammad is sacrilege. The newspaper that first published them did so as an experiment to see if satirists were capable of being as harsh to Islam as they are to other religions. The cartoons went unnoticed outside Denmark until some Muslim leaders made a point of circulating them, along with drawings far more offensive than the relatively mild stuff printed by Jyllands-Posten. It’s far from the first time that an almost-forgotten incident has been dredged up to score points.

The governments are responsible for keeping dem-onstrations non-violent. Lebanon has apologised to Denmark for failing to control a protest that torched

its Consulate in Beirut. That’s in contrast with what happened in Syria where crowds set fire to the Danish and Norwegian embassies. — The New York Times