How the media has it both ways over the ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoons

A reader sends me a card for sale in Scribblers in the King’s Road, Chelsea. It depicts two slices of cheese standing vertically on their thinner ends. On both, black beards and eyes are crudely superimposed, and above them two gold rings form haloes. The caption says ‘Cheeses of Nazareth’. The joke is pathetically bad, not least because, in order to achieve the cheese/Jesus pun, you have to have two cheeses, whereas there was only one Jesus. But my correspondent’s point is that the equivalent gag about Mohammed would provoke a storm, not only from some Muslims, but from much of the media. I recently watched an interesting example of this on Channel 4 News. It ran an item about Maajid Nawaz, the brave and moderate Muslim Liberal Democrat candidate for Hampstead, who had re-tweeted the now well-known ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon, saying that it was ‘not offensive & I am sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it’.