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“To remind readers of the stakes: In recent months, a Swedish cartoonist that sketched Mohammed as a “roundabout dog” as part of a planned street installation was assaulted during a lecture and, the following week, two extremists attempted to burn his house down. In January, the elderly Danish illustrator Kurt Westergaard, who contributed the most memorable image (of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban) among the dozen cartoons printed in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, narrowly escaped being murdered by retreating to a panic room in his apartment while an axe-wielding maniac hacked through his door. Just over the past few weeks, Viacom, the owner of Comedy Central, redacted a South Park episode featuring a possible representation of the Prophet after a website “warned” of violence and ordered The Daily Show‘s Islamic correspondent, Aasif Mandvi, not to comment on Islamic extremism (a self-described moderate Muslim, Mandvi is against it) in the wake of a failed terrorist bombing in Times Square.

These egregious events gave immediate and spontaneous rise to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” the brainchild – or brain fart, depending on your point of view – of a Seattle cartoonist who almost immediately distanced herself from the concept (“I wanted to counter fear, and then I got afraid,” she said). The concept of depicting the Prophet in both protest of violence and support of free speech remains controversial even among professional cartoonists and commentators whose contempt for political correctness, speech codes (whether imposed by states as in Europe or by state universities as in the U.S.) is unimpeachable.

But the most striking thing about Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is, in Internet parlance, itsdistributed nature. If you do an online search for “Draw Mohammed,” you will see that, with few exceptions, it has been a vastly decentralized activity. It has taken off like wildfire among individuals, among bloggers, tweeters, and facebookers, all of whom are perhaps a bit to quick in quoting the line, “I’m Spartacus!,” an allusion to a movie in which slaves stand up to tyrants by spreading responsibility for revolt across thousands, thus making it impossible to contain.”