Comedy Central censored South Park, say creators

South Park's fearless creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone could be heading for a fall-out with the TV station Comedy Central as well as angry Muslims over the cartoon's depiction of the Prophet Mohammed.
 
Last week the landmark 200th episode of the risque show drew criticism for featuring Mohammed and offending Muslims. But this week's edition, which continued the storyline involving Mohammed, was heavily censored - apparently by the station rather than the programme makers.
 
In the latest episode, shown on Wednesday night, Mohammed was replaced on screen by a black silhouette and the word 'censored' and all mentions of him were replaced by bleeps. At the end of every show one of the main characters, Kyle, delivers a speech explaining the moral of the episode, but his epilogue on Wednesday was entirely bleeped out.
 
That sparked a debate on the internet over whether the cuts had been made by the programme makers or had been forced upon them.
 
The answer came in a statement from Parker and Stone, who made it clear that Comedy Central were less gung-ho about offending Islam than they were. They wrote: "In the 14 years we've been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn't stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn't some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps.
 
"In fact, Kyle's customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn't mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too."
 
That speech could have been a reference to the "warnings" Parker and Stone received last week from a radical Muslim group, which said that the pair would "probably" end up suffering a similar fate to Theo Van Gogh, a film maker who was murdered in 2004 for criticising Islam.
 
After the furore blew up Parker and Stone said it would be "hypocritical" of them not to lampoon Islam because of threats of violence against them, and pointed out that they had featured Mohammed on the show before - in a 2001 episode.
 
Mohammed's first appearance in the show drew no criticism, but it came before 9/11 and four years before the row over caricatures of Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper, which bought the issue of depicting the Prophet to prominence.
 
The good news for South Park fans is that the next edition will go ahead. "We'll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we'll see what happens to it," promised Stone and Parker.
 
In the meantime, anyone wanting to see the censored episode will be disappointed as it is not available on the South Park website - where a statement reads: "We do not have network approval to stream our original version of the show."
 
Comedy Central have also withdrawn the 2001 episode featuring Mohammed from their website. ·