01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, February 21, 2006

CHARLESTON, S.C.

DURING the summer of 2002, Muslim extremists committed a series of suicide bombings in Israel. In response, Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist of The Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, borrowed from the popular Christian phrase criticizing gas-guzzling SUVs, "What would Jesus drive?," to draw a Ryder truck driven by a turban-wearing Muslim, hauling a nuclear bomb. The caption: "What would Mohammed drive?"

Muslims voiced their disapproval by sending thousands of e-mails to Marlette and his newspaper -- which had not run the cartoon but the drawing had inadvertently appeared on its Web site. The Council on American Islamic Relations and the World Muslim League demanded an apology.

Marlette said he would not apologize, and that Muslim groups were misdirecting their anger. "Muslim fundamentalists have committed devastating acts of terrorism against our country in the name of the Prophet" Muhammad, he said.

Marlette explained that he had used a Ryder truck like the one used by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. He further defended the cartoon in the context of post-Sept. 11, 2001. Given the suicide bombings in Israel and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Marlette said, the cartoon was appropriate. He said that his cartoon was not intended to be taken literally -- adding dryly that "there were no Ryder trucks in Mohammed's time."

Marlette drew his cartoon in America, which is thousands of miles from countries with a significant Muslim population. And therein lies an important difference between his cartoon and the cartoons that first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

The Jyllands-Posten drawings have recently appeared in dozens of other newspapers throughout Western Europe, offending millions of Muslims, who have burned Danish embassies in Muslim countries and committed other acts of violence. Muslim countries are also waging a trade embargo against Denmark and other countries where the offending cartoons were published.

Doug Marlette's cartoon included a generic Muslim, not the Prophet Muhammad; one Jyllands-Posten cartoon shows the Prophet in a turban shaped like a bomb with a burning fuse. Muslims consider drawings of the Prophet to be blasphemous. Marlette, as he explained, had drawn his cartoon in reference to a specific news story; European newspapers published the Jyllands-Posten cartoons for no other reason, it appears, than to offend or humiliate Muslims.

Israeli editorial cartoonist Ranan Lurie once called satire the most extreme form of expression that society will tolerate. What's clear about the recent ugliness is that not all satire is tolerated, and that one's level of tolerance often depends on who is being satirized.

This is not the first time an editorial cartoonist has created an international incident. During War I, Louis Reamaekers, of the Netherlands, was prosecuted by his own country because it was believed that his anti-German drawings had endangered the country's neutrality. During World War II, Adolf Hitler ordered the name of English cartoonist David Low put on the Gestapo's list of people to be exterminated.

Even in America, which prides itself on its tradition of free speech, editorial cartoonists have been jailed, beaten, sued, and censored for their drawings. In other instances, readers have taken their anger to the streets.

After a white mob lynched a black man in Maryland in 1931, Edmund Duffy, of The Baltimore Sun, drew a black man dangling from a rope. The drawing includes only the title of the state song, "Maryland, My Maryland!" Incensed readers, many of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan, attacked the Sun delivery trucks, burned the newspapers, and beat up the drivers.

The cartoon, however unpopular with some readers, publicized the savage practice of lynching and raised awareness among other readers and legislators -- which led to the state's passing stronger anti-lynching legislation.

Duffy's editor, the venerable H.L. Mencken, once summed up the simple potency of editorial cartooning by saying, "Give me a good cartoonist and I can throw out half the editorial staff."

Chris Lamb, an associate professor of media studies at the College of Charleston (S.C.), is author of the book Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons (Columbia University Press, 2004).