The agony of assimilation.

THE cartoon war--the struggle over a Danish newspaper's caricatures of Muhammad--rages on, with lethal riots in Africa and Asia and protests in Europe and the United States.

The cause of Muslim anger is pride. Muslim tradition says different things about depicting Muhammad--some artists have shown his face, others have shown his body with a veiled face, still others refuse to show him at all. But in the modern world of Internet access and global cultural churning, mildly satiric depictions of him by outsiders appeared as an affront, a diss to every Muslim.

This feeling of wounded pride is used to gain or hold power. In countries where the worst violence has occurred, cartoon riots are the substitute for political primaries. Here aspiring politicians troop to Iowa and New Hampshire. There, where elections are erratic or nonexistent, they call out the mob. If the police kill a few of them (as in Libya or Pakistan), or if they kill a few Christians (as in Nigeria), it is a campaign expense, a cost of doing business.

In countries with functioning civil societies, the protests have been less deadly, but sinister in different ways. Muhammad Yaqoob Qureshi, a government minister in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, offered $11.5 million to anyone who killed the Danish cartoonists. His colleagues blandly explained his incitement to murder as a "personal wish," not a statement made "in his capacity as a minister." Other Indians were properly outraged: The BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, called for Qureshi's arrest, while the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, a group of scholars, denounced his comment as "anti-Islamic and anti-humanity."

Qureshi is a demagogic Muslim politician. What excuse does Gunter Grass have? The Nobel laureate compared the Danish cartoons to the anti-Semitic incitements of Der Sturmer. Nazi propaganda is illegal in Germany, for excellent historical reasons. Is Grass then saying that the Danish cartoonists should be arrested? Sympathy for the sensibilities of others morphs into paranoia.

Decent people do not casually offend the sacred prejudices of their neighbors. When Roberto Calderoli, a minister in Silvio Berlusconi's coalition, went on Italian television wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Muhammad cartoons, he had to quit. But free countries allow freedom to the offensive. The Danish publisher of the original cartoons was trying to make a serious point about self-censorship in the face of Muslim immigrant cultural demands. If Muslims do not like a world in which they may happen to be displeased, they should go back to the certainties, and the riots, of their homelands.