Capitulation
The American publisher Yale University Press has decided, after advice from experts, to remove illustrations of the prophet Mohammed from a book about the Mohammed crisis.
This applies both to a reprint of the page in the Jyllands Posten newspaper showing the cartoons as well as a range of examples of illustrations of the prophet made by, among others, Gustave Doré and Auguste Rodin. The book was written by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who during the affair acted with the view that the crisis, despite death threats and demands of censorship, was about mocking a cowed minority. It is the irony of fate that professor Klausen is now herself subjected to censorship because a bunch of consultants thinks that it could incite violence if drawings are printed in her book. Unlike in Denmark, where painters and writers remained cautiously silent when colleagues were subjected to threats and censorship, the American Association of University Professors has protested on behalf of their members because we are here talking about an assault on academic freedom. As the professors sarcastically formulate it, the publishers have indirectly, with their in-advance censorship, said no to negotiations with terrorists but have instead chosen to accede to the terrorists’ demands up front. The capitulation, in other words, is total.
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Two things stand out clearly in this insane debate, which started with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie twenty years ago. Firstly, the offense-fundamentalists’ lack of ability to distinguish between offender and victim. In the publishers’ defense of censorship, and in hundreds of articles and comments, it is stated that the drawings incited violence. Meaning that those who print the drawings hold responsibility. The CEO of the publisher even stated that if anyone should be harmed as a consequence of the reprint, he would have blood on his hands. But the fact is such that if anybody reacts with violence and threats in response to a legal act, then it is the perpetrator, and he alone, who bears the responsibility, and it is the responsibility of the state and the public to defend the right of the individual to do and say as it like as long as this does not violate the law. This also includes the right to violate religious feelings. The absurdity in the logic of the publisher CEO’s logic can be illustrated with an example: if a terrorist says that he will kill anyone who predicts rain next week and some citizens who dare to repeat the weather forecast get killed thereafter, then the meteorologist has blood on his hands, and the citizens themselves bear responsibility for losing their lives. The madness is obvious, but apparently not when it comes to Islam.
It is disturbing that the publishers and their like-minded colleagues have adopted this ‘culture-of-threats’ point of view. Large parts of the Western world have internalized the fatwa against Rushdie while proposing toasts in favor of freedom of speech. The message to the practitioners of the ‘culture-of-threats’ is clear: if you threaten us we will do as you say, and we acknowledge that, if we do not, the violence is our responsibility. Could anyone think of a more obvious way to incite violence? The publishers think that by censoring they are showing consideration, but in reality they violate and discriminate against Muslims. Because their censorship is built on the assumption that Muslims are a mob of disruptive assailants and fanatics which should not be treated as other citizens. What kind of humanity is that? It is time to stop this totally unacceptable mocking of Muslims.
5 comments:
Money seems to be the real reason for the pressure on Yale University Press: it was the office of the president of Yale that 'advised' the publisher not to print the motoons..
the threats-of-violence trope was a pretext, or at most a subsidiary concern” for Yale. What was the real reason that Yale was anxious to bowdlerize Professor Klausen’s book? Even now, I know, energetic investigative reporters are looking into Yale’s financial relationship with some of the spots where Linda Lorimer, Vice President and Secretary of the University, told Professor Klausen she has often traveled recently: Saudi Arabia, for example
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/984/More-Lux-et-Dhimmitude-Cherchez-La-Dough.aspx
http://sandbox.blog-city.com/some_day_yales_prince_will_come.htm
I can see it now: a book about cartoons with no cartoons in it - yep, bound to be a best-seller.
A satirist would be hard-pressed to make something like this up. Truth is now stranger than fiction.
In the publishers’ defense of censorship, and in hundreds of articles and comments, it is stated that the drawings incited violence.
If this were true, then why were there not any riots immediately after the cartoons' publication on September 30, 2005 by Jyllands-Posten?
In fact, there were not any riots until the now-deceased (unfortunately of natural causes), Danish imam, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban and co-criminal, Akhmad Akkari, traveled to the Middle East with a dossier of the cartoons which also included several highly inflammatory images that never appeared in the original Jyllands-Posten newspaper article.
The Brussels Journal covered this criminal incitement but, by then, it was too late:
The Brussels Journal has always doubted whether the cartoons added by the imams were genuine. Whenever we mentioned them we explicitly wondered whether they were not “of the imam’s own making.” Certain Western mainstream media, however, such as the Australian network SBS and the British BBC authoritatively declared that the pigsnout was one of Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons.
Unsurprisingly, the killings and riots did not even begin until nearly HALF A YEAR LATER. They were a direct result of Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban and co-conspirator, Akhmad Akkari, travelling to the Middle East and presenting their package of malicious filth at a December 6, 2005 summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
Akhmad Akkari, spokesman of the 21 Danish Muslim organizations which organized the tour, explained that the three drawings had been added to “give an insight in how hateful the atmosphere in Denmark is towards Muslims.” Akkari claimed he does not know the origin of the three pictures. He said they had been sent anonymously to Danish Muslims. However, when Ekstra Bladet asked if it could talk to these Muslims, Akkari refused to reveal their identity. [emphasis added]
Even then, it still took several more weeks to torque up the turbans of enough hotheads whereby sufficient bloodshed and mayhem would result. The riots, torched embassies and hundereds of deaths would have to wait until February of 2006. With its "if it bleeds, it leads", mentality, Western media ate up the ensuing carnage without ever pausing to ponder about the conspicuous string of coincidences that preceded this typical orchestrated Islamic hype.
Laban and Akkari alone bear direct responsibility for the international riots that saw hundreds killed and thousands injured.
Instead, we are now treated to the ghastly spectacle of Western academics and publishers self-censoring their output due to fears based upon wholly fabricated incidents. Nazi propagandist Joeseph Goebbels could hardly have envisioned so successful a campaign to stifle free thought and speech as that which Laban and Akkari concocted.
The message to the practitioners of the ‘culture-of-threats’ is clear: if you threaten us we will do as you say, and we acknowledge that, if we do not, the violence is our responsibility. Could anyone think of a more obvious way to incite violence?.
How far can such enablement of terrorism go without being considered aiding and abetting or, even, being a direct accomplice to the act? While Spain may have set the bar for caving into terrorist demands, Western media continually tries to go them one better in a race to appease those for whom there is no possible appeasement.
Western media is feeding a crocodile that might have starved to death without such careful nurturing. We are now confronted with a well-fed and ravenous Islamic beast that is prepared to devour all other nations in a spate of Global Cultural Genocide™.
Sickest of all is how this pandering to perpetually aggrieved and overblown Islamic sensitivities will more than likely lead to the nuclear annihilation of millions of Muslims.
A now-emboldened Islam is only more convinced of its invincibility and Western traitors continue to feed this baseless delusion even as Muslims, be it by their thunderous silence or outright complicity, dig their own mass grave.
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