Berkeley’s conservative student paper, the California Patriot, is humiliating and offending 1.2 billion Muslims with their latest edition: The little cartoons that started a great big war ... and why they have to be published.

Seething to follow.

UPDATE at 3/17/06 2:22:40 pm:

Cancel the seethe alert; the MSA in Berkeley is getting cannier: Cal Muslim group says it won’t protest images in magazine.

The Cal Muslim Student Association at UC Berkeley won’t protest a campus conservative magazine’s decision to reprint two of the Danish cartoons that prompted outrage in the Muslim world for lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

The cartoons already have been debated on campus, and California Patriot magazine’s republication of two images, along with an article saying the cartoons are justified as examples of free speech, adds nothing to the issue, said Roberta Davenport, the Muslim student association’s vice president.

“They’re a day late and a dollar short, obviously,” she said.

The Muslim group’s political action committee met Monday night and decided against a strong response to the magazine’s decision.

“We decided not to protest or anything like that, because that doesn’t serve any of our goals,” she said.