Last month the Danish police arrested two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent on charges of plotting to kill Mr. Westergaard, one of the 12cartoonists whose pictures of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten sparked protests, some of them violent, by Muslims around the world in 2006 and put bounties on the heads of Mr. Westergaard and his editor, Flemming Rose. Mr. Westergaard (he drew Muhammad with a bomb in his turban) has been in hiding ever since.

...

In the days shortly after, 17 Danish newspapers, having declined to publish the offending cartoons two years ago, declared solidarity with Mr. Westergaard and printed them. This, naturally, provoked a fresh round of protests from Gaza to Indonesia.

In Egypt the speaker of the Parliament claimed Danes had violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which seemed a little rich coming just a few weeks after the European Parliament, which itself complained about the cartoons’ re-publication, condemned Egypt for the sorry state of its human rights.

Meanwhile demands in Afghanistan for the instant withdrawal of Danish troops under NATO’s command and the severing of all diplomatic ties with Denmark caused Denmark’s foreign minister, Per Stig Moeller, to reply that it was becoming difficult for him “to put Danish soldiers’ lives in danger” to support a country “where one is at risk to be condemned to death for values that we believe to be an inseparable part of democracy and the modern world.”

And, of course, in time for the prophet's birthday and in recognition of the fifth anniversary of the quite right toppling of the dictator Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons on his own people, funded a pay-to-die program for suicide bombers, provided safe haven to al Qaeda, and had terrorist training camps (including Salman Pak, of course) of his very own where he quite literally trained people to kill Americans and Jews, we have a new message from Osama bin Laden.

"You went overboard in your unbelief and freed yourselves of the etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of publishing these insulting drawings," he said, according to a transcript released by the SITE Institute, another U.S. group that monitors terror messages. "This is the greater and more serious tragedy, and reckoning for it will be more severe."

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Bin Laden dismissed as "excuses" Europe's citing of freedom of expression to justify the publishing of the cartoons.

"If there is no check on the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions," according to the transcript.

What a gasbag.

Interestingly, this new message provides no real evidence that the asshole is still living. The controversy is two years old and nothing in the message dates past December 2006. He may be wormfood!

Now there's a warm fuzzy!