Las Vegas Review-Journal - Thomas Mitchell

First they physically attacked him, now, according to an English-language Swedish news website, they've attacked his poor, defenseless website.

We're talking about that public enemy of peace and civility Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who once dashed off a few crude sketches of Muhammad with a dog's body. It was after those Danish cartoons that sparked riots and deaths in the Islamic Middle East and elsewhere.

He was assaulted earlier while giving a lecture on the limits of artistic freedom at Uppsala University near Stockholm. Before that he was the target of an assassination plot that included an American woman dubbed Jihad Jane. There was even a Facebook page devoted to devotees of his murder.

According to the Swedish news site, when you go to vilks.net you are greeted by a message from a hacker with the signature Al Qatari. You also get some over-the-top screaming in some language undecipherable and a message: "You (expletive) Lars Vilks Still Talking about the Prophet Muhammad ... We Really Never Stop Hacking Your Site and I will show you how can I Hacking you Computer." That was as of Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, we've shown our backbone ... or perhaps our backsides while retreating in fear of these yahoos. Yale published a book about those Danish cartoons and declined to include any of the cartoons. The creators of that irreverent cartoon South Park, which has lampooned everything dear and sacred to just about anyone, were censored by the Cartoon Network when they deigned to take on Muhammad as a topic.

Here is the lively debate that occurred at the university. Free speech meet flying fists.

I told you they were crude.