It’s all true. I have the clip, although for obvious reasons I’m not going to post it. They even kept the name of the town in which he lives onscreen for most of the segment so I can’t show you the bit with the nut in the burqa saying she wants to kill him. But here’s the strangest part, which isn’t clear from the Gates of Vienna post: Vilks is aware that they’re filming him in front of the two houses. It’s not some stock shot of the door and the light fixture; it’s him, entering the building, with the camera right in his face. Unless CNN led him to believe that they weren’t filming or weren’t going to use the footage, and there’s no reason to think that they did, it was all done with his willing participation. Which, given the bounty placed on his head by Al Qaeda in Iraq and the verdict of Swedish police that he’s not safe at home, makes him one recklessly special idiot.

Here’s my favorite part, though. I blacked out the square on the lower right to obscure the name of his town but the distortion in the image of Jesus on the left was done by CNN. It’s one of Vilks’s drawings showing Christ being serviced by a small boy as a commentary, presumably, on the pedophile priest scandal. CNN used it as an example of how he’s no stranger to risque religious works. Here’s the original.

Question: Why show the drawing at all if you’re only going to white out most of it, thereby making it indecipherable? Answer: Because they had already shown one of Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog earlier in the segment to give the viewers some idea of what the current controversy is about — and, stupidly and predictably, they whited out most of that too, lest any Muslims be offended and respond in the familiar way. Here’s the original and here, pathetically, is the redacted CNN version:

See what’s going on here? After the disgraceful western media blackout of the Danish cartoons, CNN obviously felt it had to make some gesture towards showing the viewers the offending work. But not only didn’t they have the balls to show the offending part, they were sufficiently worried about being accused of, ahem, “Islamophobia” for the part that they did show that they went ahead and put up the drawing of Christ — which has nothing to do with the threat to Vilks — just to prove that they’re equal opportunity offenders. Fantastically lame.