SOUTH PARK CAVES-IN TO MUSLIM DEATH THREATS

THIS WEEK IN TV: SOUTH PARK TAKES A DIVE
By Daniel Carlson

Houston Press Hair Balls
April 26, 2010

The sun chased the rain, I can feel summer coming, and I was greeted at the door by a rabbi that looks like Joaquin Phoenix. So, this is dumb:

South Park has been forced by Viacom to bend to the will of Muslim extremists. The show's 200th episode was a two-parter that reunited every celebrity that the series had mocked since its 1997 debut.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't have any success showing the prophet Muhammad in the episode "Cartoon Wars" a few seasons back, an ironic and stupid development since they were able to depict him as a cartoon in the 2001 episode "Super Best Friends."

In the wake of recent controversies dealing with cartoonists getting killed for having the gall to draw pictures of Muhammad, Comedy Central doesn't want to offend Muslims, especially since people at RevolutionMuslim.com have made threats against Parker and Stone, so they censored references to and images of Muhammad from the second part of the recent "South Park" episode.

The network did it without the input of Parker and Stone, who later issued a statement clarifying that the censorship was not some "meta-joke" and that even Kyle's final speech, which dealt with "intimidation and fear" and didn't even mention Muhammad, was bleeped out for reasons passing understanding. (The Simpsons weekly chalkboard gag stood with them on Sunday.)

The maddening thing is that the show's lampooned religions and ideologies with known wingnuts before -- fundamentalists like those at the Westboro Baptist Church aren't exactly making friends -- but the network hasn't caved to threats or some perverted attempt at political correctness before.

Censoring the episode doesn't get rid of the zealots; it just gives them another victory.