Sugar
At least the price of my cartoon was just a harmless fuck off from an internet random.
But do you know what another difference between you and murdering bastard fanatics is ?
If I had self censored, you would have been less twisted knickers in response.
Murdering bastard fanatics won't. You can self censor yourself right into a burkah, and they are not going to stop killing.
Because whatever the reason of the day is, the real motivation is power, control and permission to maim and murder.
In the same way there is nothing black people can say or do to appease the KKK and get them to leave them alone, nothing gay people can do to appease the WB church out of behaving like utter dicks, nothing any Albanian can do to appease Lega Nord-ites into non bastard-ness.
The people grooming, influencing and funding individual lost/damaged souls, impressionable teenagers, warped types who like maiming and killing... are not going to down arms on the basis of our self censorship.
Even if we gave them everything they wanted,right down to wholesale mass conversion to the "right" sort of Islam (and try doing that given that there isn't an agreed one true way) , they'd still find reasons to commit barbaric acts. If you don't believe me, go take a peek at where the vast overwhelming bulk of the victims of Islamic terrorism is. Those people sure as hell aren't making so much a mild eyebrow raise at Muhammad. They are still dying in their thousands.
What you want is a solution. To make it stop.
There isn't one. This is how it is for now. And none of us know for how long, or what will take its place in the future. Life is insecure, unpredictable and for as long as we've had life, murdering bastard fanatics have been around to make everybody else as miserable and/or as dead as they can.
So perhaps it makes more sense to hold on to the things that helped make our society better for us overall, rather than jettison them for the sake of a thing that given half a chance would make our society so very much worse ? Which does include deeply irreverent satire, particularly the variety with the greater potential for penetration, which includes cartoons, spitting image style commentary and crude/rude stand up.
Personally I am not prepared to give the above up so you can have a wholly erroneous sensation that you can control murdering bastard fanatics by limiting what you (and we) say/draw.
As for "vile stuff". There seems to a concerted effort to label cartoons that many haven't even seen, as racist.
A racist looking at them will enjoy them for racist reasons. Just like they will enjoy all and any cartoon satire of Obama for the same reason.
But when I look at them I see the same thing I see when the Pope, the Madonna, God or Jesus are satirized. A very sharp pencil poking fun at and making a mockery of the all too easily reachable weak spots in a powerful, control freaky institution. Which is not small potatoes. Smashing sacred golden calves rarely is.
Thank the god I don't believe in that such irreverence is practiced. Because it plays a significant role in maintaining the boundaries around said powerful institutions which helps us avoid them returning to a point where they censored, with bloodshed if needs be. It plays a role in keeping them out of the state, out of the bedroom, out of the courtroom. And that is a very good thing.
Unless you read history wistfully thinking "oh for the good old days".