Can you imagine a better way to set the stage for a major Alwaleed gift? Hosting for a semester the very person who structured the Harvard and Georgetown gifts, and who now directs Alwaleed’s charitable foundation? A stroke of genius.

Imagine, then—and we’re just imagining—that someone in the Yale administration, perhaps in President Levin’s office, gets wind of the fact that Yale University Press is about to publish a book on the Danish cartoons—The Cartoons That Shook the World. The book is going to include the Danish cartoons, plus earlier depictions of the Prophet Muhammad tormented in Dante’s Inferno, and who-knows-what-else. Whooah! Good luck explaining to people like Prince Alwaleed that Yale University and Yale University Press are two different shops. The university can’t interfere in editorial matters, so what’s to be done? Summon some “experts,” who’ll be smart enough to know just what to say. Yale will be accused of surrendering to an imagined threat by extremists. So be it: self-censorship to spare bloodshed in Nigeria or Indonesia still sounds a lot nobler than self-censorship to keep a Saudi prince on the line for $20 million.

In the cartoons, Little Red Riding Hood is a sexy cabaret dancer, and Snow White is a buxom black maid from Harlem. They are just two examples of cartoons now deemed too racy or politically incorrect to appear on kids’ TV.

There is also a 1943 Disney short (“Der Fuehrer’s Face”) in which Donald Duck becomes a Nazi. Originally titled “Donald Duck In Nutzi Land,” the anti-Hitler propaganda movie for the American war effort won that year’s Academy Award for short-subject cartoons but was kept out of circulation by Disney until a 2004 video release.

Ohio town mentioned in “Zits” comic strip.

The aim is to employ savvy merchandising to create a craving for Chinese cartoons – old standards like the Monkey King and new ones like the “The Magic Aster,” “McDull Kung Fu” (about a kung fu piglet) and “Pleasant Goat and Big, Big Wolf.”