Here’s some of our editorial on the cartoons:

Muslim fanatics — those who aspire to be dictators, and those who already are — have ginned up the controversy in order to gain power, or to keep it. They play to the dull acquiescence of too many ordinary Muslims. But by no means all Muslims are implicated in this shameful episode. Grand Ayatollah Sistani, leader of Iraq’s Shiites, “denounce[d] and condemn[ed]” the cartoons, but also blasted “misguided and oppressive” Muslims who have “exploited” the issue “to spread their poison and revive their old hatreds with new methods and mechanisms.” When President Bush declared, in his State of the Union address, that “liberty is the future of every nation in the Middle East, because liberty is the right and hope of all humanity,” it was Sistani and millions of Muslims, in Iraq and elsewhere, who agree with him, that he had in mind. The game for Muslim opinion is a tough one. But it will surely be lost if we forfeit.