As executive editor of the Mercury News from 1995 to 1999, Jerry Ceppos said he has probably spent six months of his life debating whether to print one controversial photograph, political cartoon or comic strip. In the case of the Muhammad cartoons that have incited much of the Muslim world to rioting, Ceppos says newspapers should publish them as part of the effort to establish a context for such violence. “I don’t know about you, but I need to better understand Islam, and I especially need to understand why these cartoons strike so deeply into the psyche of Islam,” Ceppos says in this piece written for Poynter Online.