Those cartoons again

A bad situation to find yourself in is when you have to either do a particular thing, or not do it, and both actions are completely predetermined by the circumstances around you. Not doing the thing has become just as much an action as doing it. You can't really abstain. Of course, I'm talking about the Mohammed cartoons. Once, it wasn't an issue. Who, after all, ever needs to publish a Mohammed-mocking cartoon? Now, however, if you edit a major newspaper or magazine, it's become an action that you really can't make a free choice about any longer. If you do want to do it, fine; if you don't want to do it, no matter how good or valid your reasons are, you end up looking like a gutless appeasenik. Blatant hypocrites - the various media who have demonstrated a long-standing hostility to non-Muslim religious sensibilities - are not entitled to this sympathy, but there are a lot of other people out there caught in an uncomfortable no-win zone.

At the same time, when I see the increasingly bewildering lists of who has and who hasn't published the cartoons, it seems to me no longer relevant. The genie is so comprehensively out of the bottle that it doesn't matter who pulled the cork. Does anyone really think that the burn-a-flag rent-a-crowd are keeping some kind of score on who did and didn't publish? That Tariq and Azim are rushing to renew their subscriptions to the New York Times because they spared Islamic sensibilities?