A FREE SPEECH COUNTERPROTEST IN PARIS: “You know, right before you came, we almost had them surrounded.”

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has video.

STRATEGYPAGE:

The annual Shia Ashura festival brings out the faithful in large numbers, and was banned when Saddam ruled. Since then, terrorists have attacked the Shia participants, killing 55 in 2005, and 181 in 2004. This year, the terrorists were unable to kill anyone. Iraqi police and soldiers supplied the security, with the help of some religious militias. This sharp drop in terrorist activity was no fluke.

Read the whole thing.

ANDREW SULLIVAN WRITES on Cartoon Cowardice:

The fundamental job of journalists is to give you as much information as possible to make sense of the world around you. And in this story, where the entire controversy revolves around drawings, the press is suddenly coy. You can see Saddam Hussein in his underwear and members of the royal family in compromising positions. You can see Andres Serrano’s famously blasphemous photograph of a crucifix in urine, called Piss Christ. But a political cartoon that deals with Islam? Not our job, guv. Move right along. Nothing to see here.

When people riot over cartoons as tame as these, you’d think it would be news.

UPDATE: Dave Schuler has more thoughts on the press’s timidity. As I’ve said, when you reward violence and efforts at violent intimidation, you’ll get more of them.

I also think that if the press is this scared of Islamic extremists, claims that Bush is manufacturing an artificial climate of fear regarding Islamic extremism ring rather hollow.