Courageous journalism at the BBC

I kid, obviously. When describing the current controversy over the Washington D.C. Metro refusing to take any "issue-oriented" adverts until next year just so that they can avoid showing the prize-winning "Draw Mohammed" cartoon, the BBC resorts to words rather than a picture to describe the salient image.

The advert calls for Americans to support free speech and features a bearded, turban-wearing Muhammad waving a sword and shouting: "You can't draw me!"
In reply, a cartoon bubble portrays an artist grasping a pencil and saying: "That's why I draw you."

How odd, you would have thought that they would have included an image of the cartoon rather than laboriously describe its contents.

Just to make the point, here's the image in question:

The spineless BBC writer isn't shy of displaying their orientation towards issues:

Ms Geller insists the cartoon is a "political opinion" which does not contain any violence.

Ms Geller is of course correct. There's no violence in that picture: the gentleman depicted is holding a sword, but that's as far as it goes. Yet the writer takes particular care to use reported speech and quotes, presumably to demonstrate that he or she is emphatically not in sympathy with Ms Geller or (mysteriously unnamed in the article) artist Bosch Fawstin.

Deary me. Truely, the BBC has resigned from actual journalism in order to be at the back of the line when crocodile feeding time comes around.

I'm really not keen on Pamela Gellar, but the rest of the world seems to be bending over backwards to make her admittedly extreme opinions seem really quite rational and reasonable. And we are surprised when Muslim extremism is emboldened by this obvious cowardice?