An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal is a reminder of the endangered nature of free speech. What we Americans take for granted does not exist in most of the world -- including supposedly enlightened Western Europe. The apartment of Dutch cartoonist (with a "rude sense of humor) was raided by "six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office," because his cartoons were considered offensive to Muslims. In PC parlance, "offensive" translates into "discrimination." (The illegality of the latter means that there is no right to free speech.)

Mr. Nekschot, whose cartoons had appeared mainly on his own Web site, spent the night in a jail cell. Police grabbed his computer, a hard drive and sketch pads. He's been summoned for further questioning later this month by prosecutors. He hasn't been charged with a crime, but the prosecutor's office says he's been under investigation for three years on suspicion that he violated a Dutch law that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sexual orientation.

The cartoon affair has come as a shock to a country that sees itself as a bastion of tolerance, a tradition forged by grim memories of bloody conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The Netherlands sheltered Jews and other refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and Calvinists fleeing persecution in France. Its thinkers helped nurture the 18th-century Enlightenment. Prostitutes, marijuana and pornography have been legal for decades.

"This is serious. It is about freedom of speech," says Mark Rutte, the leader of a center-right opposition party. Some of Mr. Nekschot's oeuvre is "really disgusting," he says, "but that is free speech."

Or England:

The contrasting Danish and Dutch responses "show that there is a serious struggle of ideas going on for the future of Europe," says Flemming Rose, a Danish newspaper editor who commissioned the drawings of Muhammad in Jyllands-Posten. At stake, he says, is whether democracy protects the right to offend or embraces religious taboos so that "citizens have a right not to be offended."

In Britain, a local police force got caught up recently in a flap over its use of a German shepherd puppy to promote an emergency hotline. A Muslim councilor, noting that dogs are viewed as unclean in Islam, complained that the puppy could turn off believers. The police force apologized and regretted not consulting its diversity officer.

That's how the bureaucratic enemies of free speech (assisted by other bureaucracies like "human resources" and paranoid insurance underwriters) get their foot in the door. Your right to free speech ends when "diversity" or "multiculturalism" is threatened. (A large and growing number of people believe that right here, in a country with a supposedly impregnable First Amendment. They're working to make the U.S. the non-free country that they have made Canada.)

The cartoonist who was raided calls them the "political correctness industry."

The cartoonist blames his woes on what he calls Holland's "political correctness industry," a network of often state-funded organizations set up to protect Muslims and other minority groups. One of these, an Internet monitoring group known as MDI, says it received dozens of complaints about the cartoonist's mockery of Islam and first reported him to the prosecutor's office in 2005.

"We're not sure what he does is illegal, but there is a possibility that it is not legal," says the group's head, Niels van Tamelen. Many of the complaints, he says, came from followers of a controversial Muslim convert called Abdul-Jabbar van de Ven.

Mr. Van de Ven caused an uproar after the 2004 murder of Mr. Van Gogh, when he seemed to welcome the killing on national TV. He said Mr. Wilders, the anti-immigrant legislator, also deserved to die, preferably from cancer. Mr. Nekschot, appalled by the outburst, caricatured the convert as a fatwa-spewing fanatic.

Mr. Van de Ven says he's glad to see Mr. Nekschot in trouble. The cartoonist deserves prosecution, he says, for "disgusting cartoons about our beloved prophet Muhammad, may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him." Politicians who cry about free speech, he says, "shouldn't stick their noses into judicial matters."

This is diversity, so butt out!

The artist's web site is here, and I don't care what he draws or how offensive it is. That would only be relevant factor in determining whether to hang his art in my home.

I kind of like this Osama Award cartoon, though....

I think the PC bureaucrats deserve an Osama award. They are sworn enemies of freedom, and they start small, with "Human Rights Commissions" which work to declare speech offensive, then towards outright censorship of the sort that's happening in Canada. The next step would be police raids on those who create or publish offensive speech.

Those who think "it can't happen here" (or that it can only happen in Canada or Europe) need to remember that there's a whole network of people devoted to making it happen here.