Suppose a man rattles a gorilla's cage, for no reason other than to piss the gorilla off. As justification, he cites the fact that rattling a gorilla's cage is not against the law, nor, in a free society, should it be.

Now, suppose the gorilla reaches through the bars, and throttles the man within an inch of his life. Whose fault is it?

Why, the gorilla's, of course. He should know, as all reasonable people do, that it's okay to rattle a cage. He has a perfect right to be pissed off, of course — that was, after all, the purpose of the rattling. But to resort to violence is simply not acceptable.

But while none of this is disputed, and the gorilla is, as all recognize, solely responsible for the wrongdoing — would it not also be appropriate to consider what preceded his wrongful act? Although the cage rattler was entirely within his rights, and if justice had been served would never have suffered for his perfectly innocent act of rattling the cage, is there not a point of view (not necessarily a rational one, and certainly not a legal one) whereby someone who acts with no purpose other than to piss off a gorilla might perhaps share a tiny bit of responsibility for the fact that he now has to deal with a pissed-off gorilla?

That's pretty much how I felt about those Danish cartoons that succeeded so well last year in their sole stated purpose of pissing off Muslims.

Most U.S. residents don't know it (because the mainstream media, which so many of my countrymen unfortunately rely on as their sole source of news, even in the Internet Age, have not chosen to tell them), but the very minor, far-from-mainstream Danish paper that ran those cartoons for no purpose other than to stir up trouble, not that there's anything illegal about that, has a long history of publishing material to achieve no purpose other than to provoke anger on the part of Denmark's Muslim minority. The sort that, if it were published here in the Land of the Free, and were about anybody but Muslims or Southerners, would be called, and perhaps prosecuted as, hate speech.

And as hate speech, it sure did work! They got those guys really riled up, didn't they? Even more riled up than American Christians got over The Last Temptation of Christ, if you don't mind my pointing out that Muslims aren't the only ones who get unreasonable over what they perceive as blasphemy. If a few people died and a few buildings burned, that's just collateral damage, isn't it? What's that old saying, popularized by Lenin, about omelets and eggs? And hey, it's not even their own eggs!

Of course, the level of violence incited by that movie was much lower (tho not quite nonexistent). But then, beyond an ugly controversy to drive ticket sales, nobody had much to gain by pissing off the Christians. In this case, tho, the jihadist minority looking for their Grand Confrontation with the West had plenty to gain by egging the demonstrators on until things got seriously nasty.

And the jihadists' allies on this side gained, too. I'm talking about, for example, the troglodytes (who are, let me add, within their rights under the principle of free expression but are still troglodytes) who publish books and essays I won't bother to identify because most of you have seen them, which use distorted, unbalanced and even made-up "facts" to fan the flames of hatred among American propaganda victims.

And if you think it doesn't work, look around you.

This episode, carefully nurtured on both sides (but in a legal manner, at least over here), played right into the hands of warmongers promoting the idea that our thoroughly demonized enemies are striving for nothing less than the utter destruction of civilization.

But do the current occupants of the Cradle of Civilization itself really want to destroy their ancestors' legacy? Or are they just so damned enraged and frustrated by the ongoing rape of their land and people by outside forces who, from Hiroshima to Fallujah, behave like high-tech barbarians, that they're primed to riot over anything?

I can't condone their violence, even more than I can't condone the (perfectly legal) acts that set it off. But I can, to my great sorrow, understand it.

What I can't understand are the parts of this incident that were legal.

Not that my deficiency in understanding makes those who did it any less within their rights.