Charles Krauthammer on tolerance:

The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

• In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.
• In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.
• In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital.

“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday’s craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam — this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

This double standard become obvious to the creators of South Park earlier this year:

“South Park” has been vilified as crude, disgusting and nihilistic, and the eagerness of Stone and Parker to impale every sacred cow they can reach is a major reason for its success. After all, in the fictional town of South Park, Colo. — home to third-graders Kenny, Kyle, Stan and the evil Cartman — everything is fair game. Even the Prophet Mohammed, who appeared as a superhero in a July 2001 episode called “The Super Best Friends.”

“People told us at the time, ‘You can’t really draw an image of Mohammed,’” Parker says. “And we were like, well, we can. We’re not Muslim, so it’s OK.”

In 2006, however, when Stone and Parker wanted to depict Mohammed in an episode, Comedy Central wouldn’t let them. After all, Muslims worldwide had rioted over insulting depictions of Mohammed in a newspaper in Denmark.

It seemed odd to the creators of “South Park,” who had been and were still allowed to depict Jesus in any number of profane ways. In fact, the episode in question, “Cartoon Wars,” shows a cartoon (supposedly created by al Qaeda) in which Jesus defecates on President Bush.

“That’s where we kind of agree with some of the people who’ve criticized our show,” Stone says. “Because it really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have. We’ve had him say bad words. We’ve had him shoot a gun. We’ve had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn’t just show a simple image.”

During the part of the show where Mohammed was to be depicted — benignly, Stone and Parker say — the show ran a black screen that read: “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Other networks took a similar course, refusing to air images of Mohammed — even when reporting on the Denmark cartoon riots — claiming they were refraining because they’re religiously tolerant, the South Park creators say.

“No you’re not,” Stone retorts. “You’re afraid of getting blown up. That’s what you’re afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: ‘We’re afraid of getting blown up.’”

Every time we signal that we’re willing to let extremists half a world away dictate what we say and do, we prove that threats and violence work.

Some label it “tolerance,” but the message we’re really sending is that we’ll tolerate taking orders from violent mobs in the hopes that kneeling down before them will make them more peaceful.

That’s not tolerance, that’s a societal suicide pact.