The Absurdity Of Evil

To borrow from the title of Hannah Arendt’s classic book, the Great Cartoon Crisis of 2006 isn’t an illustration of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity, as Mac Johnson of Human Events (via Tim Blair) points out:

As has now been well established by the Western press, five months ago a vicious right-wing propaganda rag in Denmark, possibly edited by a cryogenically preserved Nazi collaborator, sought specifically to denigrate Islam by commissioning a series of unspeakably horrible caricatures that baselessly portrayed Islam as having a tendency towards violence and intolerance.

Now, Muslims are not normally a people to congregate in mass protest and burn flags, hurl stones or break things. But this unprovoked act of cultural aggression (coming, as it did, out of the blue and occurring in Islam