The Huffington Post is making a big deal over what Willow Palin wrote on Facebook on Sunday, contending the words are homophobic hateful slurs. And if those words were directed at homosexuals they certainly would be. But that isn’t the case.

The 16-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin has been noticed on Facebook using the same words millions of other children her age are using on YouTube and Facebook. She called someone “gay” and a “faggot.” In that sense it’s a fairly unremarkable use of the common teenage vernacular on Facebook. (There are entire sites devoted to this phenomenon)

Is it ignorant, immature, borderline illiterate and, sadly, reflective of an American lexicon bereft of more intelligent rejoinders? Sure. But if YouTube’s comment section is any indication she’s nowhere near the bottom of the heap.

I’m not making excuses or defending Willow Palin, but I think what she should be criticized for is her command of the Queen’s English rather than picked on as some kind of homophobe. As the pop culture show South Park demonstrated in an episode last November, the “f-word” has undergone a series of etymological evolutions since it began as a “bundle of sticks”.

Willow Palin is in the public eye, but only because her mother is a prominent conservative political figure in America. If she weren’t, a teenager saying “faggot” on Facebook is more predictable than Swiss clockwork. And since she herself is not a politician, I’m not entirely sure what’s newsworthy about the incident. My guess would be that the Huffington Post is trying to imply that the words are something commonly said in the Palin family.

Actually, the word “gay” to describe something unpleasant or “faggot” as a pejorative have made a kind of comeback from the 1970s. Both these terms were used in nonsexual context when I was a child and really only disappeared by the late eighties. I don’t really know what precipitated their return. As Dan Gardner observes, the 70s appear to be back en vogue.

Some people have compared the use of these terms to the “n-word”, but I don’t see it. The n-word never really caught on in popular slang outside of black culture as an innocuous term. It has always retained its offensive construct. The same can’t be said about the words Willow used. While it’s entirely possible that gays and lesbians might be offended by their usage, it is incidental to their common and casual usage in popular slang within a nonsexual context.

To me, the fact Willow called somebody a “faggot” is indicative merely of a lack of class. Fortunately few people remain 16 their entire lives.

The above clip is from South Park’s 200th episode, which has reprised the role of the Prophet Muhammad, in a political parody of the fact that every religion can be made fun of without riots breaking out except for Islam.

In the episode, the children meet Tom Cruise at a chocolate factory where he is packing bundles of fudge into boxes. They ask him why he’s “packing fudge”, which angers Cruise and leads him to bring a lawsuit against South Park. The only way that Cruise will drop the suit is if the town brings the Prophet Muhammad to South Park.

The whole point of the show is to lampoon the double standards applied to Islam and other religions in the media. There is a scene involving the “Super Best Friends”, that features every religious figure acting as super heroes, including Buddha, who does lines of cocaine on a table as Jesus is speaking. For the scenes of Muhammad, the image is blacked out by a large “censored” graphic.

Eventually, Muhammad agrees to appear in South Park in a bear mascot costume so as not to offend Muslims. But this, apparently, still managed to upset Muslims. Despite the point of the cartoon being a farcical exaggeration of Islamic intolerance, reality managed to disprove that it was an exaggeration at all.

An Islamic group posted a video on YouTube today condemning the South Park episode, and calling for attacks on the creators. They posted images of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, followed with images of others who have dared to insult Islam, including a picture of the murdered Theo Van Gogh with a knife sticking out of his chest. In the video the speaker said that whosoever insults Islam shall be met with the sword, and that once the followers of Islam have taken up the sword against someone, there shall be no negotiation that causes them to change their mind.

This could properly be termed an official “fatwa” against the creators of South Park.

“We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show,” the group said on its website. “This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality that will likely happen to them.”

South Park has managed to illustrate that not only does Islam not have a funny bone, but that it is a dangerously violent and extremist faith that is so intolerant that it actually manages to chill something as unserious as a cartoon notorious for portraying Satan as being in a homosexual relationship with Saddam Hussein.

CNN asks rhetorically whether South Park has gone “too far” this time. But, of course, it hasn’t gone far enough. The fact remains that we allow our fear of radical Islam to keep us from publishing portrayals of the prophet in the media, lest we inflame the delicate sensibilities of people for whom the concept of humour seems to have been surgically removed at birth.

No one has questioned the freedom of Muslims to believe that the Prophet Muhammad cannot be depicted, but to impose that view on the rest of the world isn’t an opinion any longer. It’s tyranny. South Park cleverly illustrates just how far that tyranny has spread, when a cartoon about a bear representing the prophet can compel Muslims to threaten murder.

South Park will be spoofing a real life incident in an episode in which the show’s ultra-conservative Eric Cartman goes to Afghanistan in order to sign out 500 AK-47 assault rifles from a U.S. weapons bunker. In the clip, Eric Cartman asks the guard on desk duty for 500 AK-47′s. The guard says that Eric will have to sign for them, to which he replies “not a problem.”

The frightening thing about this scene is that it’s something that actually happened. In September of 2008, employees of the mercenary private security corporation Blackwater, notorious for it’s involvement in the Iraq War as a contractor for the United States government, walked into a U.S. weapons bunker and signed for a shipment using the pseudonym of the South Park cartoon character. To date, Blackwater has yet to return the guns to the U.S. military.

The shadowy military contractor has been involved in numerous controversies, some involving weapons. In November of 2008, the U.S. State Department issued a multi-million-dollar fine to Blackwater for shipping hundreds of automatic weapons to Iraq without the proper permits. The weapons are believed to have ended up on the black market, and may have been used against U.S. troops.

On one of two suspected occasions that Blackwater visited the American weapons bunker, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman”. The company invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination when approached by the Senate Armed Services Committee to explain the incident.

It should be interesting to finally see the untold true story on Comedy Central.