I sensed that the whole thing had something to do with my last column , in which I shamelessly jumped on the ‘cartooning as free speech’ bandwagon in order to have a dig at the most dangerous member of our species, the Nova Scotian.

Sure enough, my hunch was right. God was not pleased by my little excursion into international controversy. He was especially miffed that there had been absolutely no protest, no death threats, and most importantly no burning of anything other than a piece of toast in the canteen. In short, the whole thing was an utter debacle and a humiliation for the Halifax Live, as it appeared that not a soul had noticed our provocation.

My first instinct was to vehemently deny that the whole thing had been a flop. After all, I pointed out, a certain Mrs Allison McKinley from Amherst had emailed me a strongly worded message, in which she pointed out that there was a comma missing in the third sentence of the second paragraph. Was that not protest enough, I demanded to know? 

God dismissed my objections and got irritated when I theorised that any local Jihadists could not possibly have attacked our offices, since a) the blizzard had made travel virtually impossible, b)  it was the weekend , meaning that kids had to be driven to hockey games and the weekly cleaning had to be done and , most importantly,  c) that our HQ in his mother’s basement was hard to find and not really the most glamorous of targets.

No, the old boy could not be calmed down. In his eyes, the deafening silence that had accompanied my column had made me an agent provocateur of the fifth order, one who would certainly be given a pay cut if he were actually paid. There was only one thing to do in order to stir the masses into a frenzy: apologise  for the whole thing.

For the next few hours we sat around arguing, before deciding that the pizza that night should not include anchovies . As for the retraction, the whole thing was left up to me. God wanted to watch the Superbowl.

Anyway, here it goes: Halifax Live would like to apologise for the cartoons that appeared on its pages, and retract the entire content of the offending drawings, especially the part about the blizzard. We also regret our claim that we are based in Andorra, which resulted in the boycott of their pickled herring products by the government of Botswana.

We would, furthermore, like to heap apologies on the following groups: Muslims, Christians, Jews, left handed Buddhists, albino Jehovah’s Witnesses, dyslexic Scientologists, Mormons with athlete’s foot, Mennonites with haemorrhoids, mad fishmongers, Paris Hilton groupies, fans of Tears for Fears , alcoholic mermaids, gay Trekkies and anyone who likes the word ‘proactive’.

Finally, we would now like to retract the retraction and propose that eleven of the Danish cartoonist meet eleven randomly chosen Imams for a soccer match: winner is right about everything. Alternatively, we might all rally around a common enemy. Liechtenstein should do the trick. Nothing good has ever come out of that country. [ editor’s note: we apologise about that last bit . Lichtenstein is a splendid country]

Frank Streicher will now return to his day job counting sheep for rich people with insomnia. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it