Yale University keeps digging itself deeper and deeper into a hole. Unless you’ve been far, far away, you know the rudiments of the latest episode of academic pusillanimity.

The background: many months ago, Yale University Press contracted to publish a book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born scholar who teaches at Brandeis. The eponymous cartoons are, of course, the caricatures of Mohammed that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published in September 2005. You know what happened then: members of the “religion of peace” rioted and set fire to sundry Danish embassies, leaving a trail of murder and mayhem that ultimately left some 200 people dead.

According to its advance press, Professor Klausen’s book, due out in November, argues that this violence was not a spontaneous upsurge by the Muslim “street”; rather, it was “o ...