The ‘Prophet Mohammed’ caricature saga has reached a new level of ridiculousness, with a Russian government agency announcing plans to shut down Bankfax, a popular online news website. The announcement comes after an anonymous reader posted the now-famous caricature on the Bankfax forum and ‘called for the destruction of Islam’.

The agency responsible for the decision is the Siberian branch of the Federal Service for Media Law Compliance and Cultural Heritage. It said that Bankfax ‘must be held responsible for the information it disseminates’ — a strange proposition indeed given the inherently intractable uncontrollable nature of public fora, and the fact that the caricature was in any event hardly illegal or defamatory.

The irony of all this ideological self-consciousness is that the cartoons, however offensive, are now more widely available than ever.