On April 12, 2006, creators and executive producers of the animated sitcom “South Park”, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, produced an episode of their cartoon featuring the prophet Muhammad. Fearing terrorist retaliation, Comedy Central, the network which airs South Park, censored it.

Two weeks ago they tried again.

The episode began with the South Park boys finding Tom Cruise in a candy factory packing fudge. Incensed when he is called a “Fudge Packer”, he gathers together all of the celebrities ever mocked by South Park into a class action lawsuit against the town.

The South Park residents ask Tom what they can do to get him to drop the suit. Since he only wanted the gay jokes to stop, and since there is only one person in the entire world (above Gandhi, the President of the United States, even Jesus himself) who can not ever be mocked, Tom asks the town to deliver him the Prophet Muhammad, so that he may learn Muhammad’s secret of being above ridicule.

In order to deliver him, however, South Park residents would have to show him. So they struggle with how to do it. Do they put him inside a U-Haul with no windows, is that okay? What about covered with a sheet, or in a bear suit? If he talks, is that okay?

As thy try to figure out how to deliver Muhammad, a group of “Gingers” – red head kids tired of being made fun of, plant bombs throughout South Park and demand the prophet for themselves, or they’ll blow up the town.

Since the threat of getting blown up is scarier than a lawsuit, the town decides to give in to the Gingers. Seeing that the threat of violence works better than legal action, the celebrities decide to attack the town until Muhammad is delivered to them.

The episode was a cliffhanger. By acquiesced to the terrorist demands of the Gingers, South Park has encouraged more demands. If they do not deliver Muhammad to either side, both will destroy them. If they do deliver Muhammad to one side, the other will destroy them (as will Muslim extremists, since in order to deliver him the town must “show” him to prove it’s really him, and doing so is forbidden by Muslims). As the town succumbs to fear, the boys try to protect Muhammad while also argue why the town must not submit to threats of violence.

In a single, genius stroke (common to the Emmy Award winning show), Matt and Trey scripted real life into the show and the show into real life, putting Comedy Central in the very spot the characters of South Park found themselves in, and with the first episode itself an argument for the uncensored airing of the second.

While the FCC does have decency standards of what can and can not air on television, those standards do not apply as strictly to cable channels like Comedy Central, and the airing of Muhammad is not in fact prohibited by either the laws or customs of the United states. None the less, the question became, would they air the second episode completely uncensored.

After airing the first, an extremist Muslim organization in New York published veiled threats against the lives of Trey and Matt, as well as their home addresses and those of the Comedy Central offices in New York and California.

Threats began pouring in, as well as photographs of the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker murdered for a documentary he made about Muslim women (the writer of the documentary remains in hiding). Hours before the airing of the second episode, the police reported what they called a “credible bomb threat” against the network.

The episode ran, with vast swaths of it censored, not just the images of Muhammad, but even the mentioning of his name (which had previously been uncensored) and even the final “moral of the story” scene (common to south park episodes) where the characters discuss what they’ve learned about the cost of free speech and the tactics of terrorism.

Should the episode have been censored? I don’t know, I’m not even sure there is a “right” answer. Both showing and not showing the image carries significant potential consequences and any choice they make probably can’t be defined in terms of right or wrong, but rather as a choice of character. What does the president of the network tell a single mother working as a receptionist at the front desk, who loves free speech as much as anyone, but is just trying to raise her children, to feed them, and whose office is now under threat of suicide bombing (and Comedy Central doesn’t offer hazard pay, I checked)?

So what do we do?

In the final scenes in “Spartacus”, the Romans have captured the slave army, and offer to let them go free if the leader Spartacus will identify himself so they may torture and kill him. Each of the slaves in turn stands up and shouts “I am Spartacus.”

This is an issue of free speech, and nobody benefits from free speech more than American television networks. Shows like Dateline, 60 Minutes, and Frontline all survive because of free speech. Where are they? Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Keith Olberman consider themselves patriots, standing up for the constitution and for American rights and liberties. They have reported on this very incident, but have not shown (or attempted to show) Muhammad themselves. If every network in the country airs his image (respectfully, in the context of reporting on this story) – it defuses the responsibility, makes all networks – all of whom profit from free speech, equally culpable. Yes, terrorists might then want to bomb all of these networks, but last I checked they already want to do that.

The idea that any one religion, person, or prophet is or should be above critique or scrutiny should always be challenged, and the purpose of the very first amendment to the constitution of these united states is to guarantee that freedom. And in the face of threats to that freedom, it is the responsibility of those who most profit from it to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!”

“Killing infidels assures you of Paradise.”
Qur’an, 47:4-6

“Certain Men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying ‘Let us go and serve other gods, which you have not known’; Then shalt thou enquire, and make search and ask diligently, and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought among you, Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein… and shalt burn with fire the city… for the LORD thy God.”
Deuteronomy 13:13-16

On November 14th CNN’s Glen Beck asked Representative Elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to congress, to prove that he wasn’t a terrorist “working with our enemies”.

The question was answered as best it could be. There were no cries for Beck’s resignation, no major newspaper articles, and no concerns raised over a CNN representative asking such a question.

The first problem, known to journalists, logisticians, philosophers, politicians, and lawyers alike, is that it’s often impossible to prove negative. How would you go about proving that you have never committed murder, robbed a bank, or attended a communist rally? While proving that you have not been caught doing any of these things may be relatively simple, proving you haven’t done them is all but impossible, and any responsible news commentator should know that.

But that Glen Beck could ask such an unfair question is not the most frightening part. What is most frightening is that it’s been five years since 9/11, and members of the mainstream media (and the public at large) still don’t understand who our enemy is or appear to have any interest in making a concerted effort to distinguish between them and us.

While most Americans are cognizant of the fact that not all Muslims hate America or believe in killing infidels, many none the less still, at the very least, hold in the back of their minds some reservations about members of the religion. Many, if they encounter a Muslim who claims not to condone the murder of innocent people, do not believe him. If they believe him, they do so with a nagging sense that he could at any time be converted to the violence of his faith. If they believe he never would, they applaud his courage in standing up to his religion while secretly wondering if they can trust the kind of bankrupt individual would choose a faith and then turn his back on it.

How do we know Islam a violent faith? Because they kill each other, because they kill us, and because their holy book commands that they kill non believers?

While they may be true, none of these facts are even remotely exclusive to Islam.

The Christian bible (their holy book, made up of the Old and the New Testaments) advocates the exact same thing, expanding the definition of “infidels” to include anyone who disagrees with a judge (Deut 17:12), homosexuals (Lev 20:13), people who claim to be psychic (Lev 20:27), people who curse or strike their parents (Prov 20:20, Lev 20:9), adulterers and fornicators (Lev 20:10 – 21:9), and people who work on the Sabbath – all of whom it is one’s obligation to kill.

Most Christians do not follow these commandments, since they are in the Old Testament. Yet the Old Testament is a part of the Christian bible. If there are parts of the bible which Christians feel they are not bound to (and in fact should ignore), why is it so hard to believe that Muslims might feel the same way about parts of the Qur’an? Is it not hypocritical to condone Muslims for violent commandments in the Qur’an but not Christians for violent commandments in the Bible?

The 9/11 hijackers may have been Muslim, as may Al-Qaeda be. But while they are prominent villains in our society, they represent an interpretation of the Qur’an held by less than 1% of 1% of the Muslim population. Over 1.3 billion Muslims live on this planet, the vast majority of them peacefully.

The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan are terrorists (for what is a cross burning if not an act designed solely to terrorize). They fire bomb homes and churches, they murder African Americans and homosexuals, and have even been known to advocate the overthrow of the United States government. They are also Christians, or, at the very least, call themselves Christian and commit their terrorism in the name of the Bible.

While members of the KKK consider themselves Christians, the overwhelming majority of Christians disagree, and vehemently oppose both their views and methods. The same is also true for Al-Qaeda, an organization calling itself Muslim, but denounced by the vast majority of Muslims who shutter at the thought of being associated with these murderers.

Yes, a number of Shiites and Sunnis kill each other. So do Protestants and Catholics, whose violence in Belfast is checked only by the vigilance of military and civilian authorities (who had successfully contained the sectarian violence in Iraq until we disbanded them).

Muslims didn’t cause World Wars I or II. They didn’t cause the Spanish or Medieval Inquisitions, or the Holocaust, and are no more to blame than Christians for the Crusades. They represent the second largest religion in the world, but Islam has been used to justify far fewer atrocities than other religions.

And Muslims in this country try to tell us this, that violence in their religion is the exception, not the norm. But we don’t listen to them, because… well… they’re terrorists, they’ll say anything.

If we decry getting drunk and blaming Jews for all the wars in history, or someone throwing the “N-Word” at hecklers during a comedy act, but allow news commentators from respected networks to ask Muslims to prove that they are not terrorists, we become a country, not of freedom and acceptance, but of hypocrisy and ignorance.

And if we become those things, what exactly is it we fighting to defend?