Here’s a very odd piece from yesterday’s Boston Globe by Martha Bayles taking a somewhat contrarian view on Germany’s Idomeneo controversy. Basically her irritation about some aspects of modern art leads her to lose sight of what matters. Yes, some of what’s produced in the name of art today may be pretentious, irritating, worthless, gratuitously offensive, you name it, but so what? Freedom of expression shouldn’t be negotiable. You don’t like it, well, don’t look at it.

But it’s when Bayles turns her attention to the cartoon jihad, that she really goes off the rails. “Islam,” she writes, “is starting to look like the new target of opportunity for transgressive artists — and their amassed intellectual defenders — in Europe. For example, the publication of the celebrated Danish cartoons was a clear case of a newspaper taking 100 yards when 50 would have sufficed. The incident began when the editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper heard that a children’s book publisher could not find an illustrator for a book about Islam, because artists were afraid of reprisals if they depicted the Prophet Mohammed. The 25-yard position would have been to cave in to the threats, the 50-yard one to commission illustrations suitable for a respectful treatment of Islam meant to educate Danish schoolchildren. Would that have caused outrage? Maybe among murderous fanatics, but not among the vast majority of Muslims. But 50 yards was out of the question. In keeping with the high church of art, the editor took 100, and asked artists to submit insulting and derogatory images, thereby sparking the sort of protest that was once every transgressive artist’s dream — and is now becoming every free citizen’s nightmare.”

I’d like to know quite who these transgressive artists are. Artistic attacks on, or mockery of, Islam are difficult to find in today’s Europe. I suppose Theo van Gogh was an example of someone who did go in for that, but, Martha, he’s dead now. And I think you know how. And I think you know why. As for Europe’s “amassed intellectual defenders” of such free spirits, where are they?

As for the cartoons, the editor of Jyllands-Posten did not ask for “insulting and derogatory” images and (you might argue the case about one or two of them), nor did he get them.

The outrage was not the cartoons, but what happened afterwards.