Whenever the cultural enrichers in Denmark instigate another crisis over the Mohammed Cartoons, the Danish press always responds by reprinting one or more of the Motoons, especially the iconic image drawn by Kurt Westergaard.
The first MSM republishing of the Turban Bomb Motoon since last night’s attempt on Kurt Westergaard’s life appeared in the online version of this morning’s
Berlingske Tidende. Our Danish correspondent TB has translated the accompanying blog post by Jacob Mchangama, which displays the resolute common sense that we have come to expect from the Danes:
Self-censorship or “more gas on the bonfire”?
The news about the attack on Kurt Westergaard, which the police luckily were able to stop, shows in the most scary way how wrong the notion of Berlingske and Politiken was, after the latest terror threats against KW and JP. As we all know, the notion was that “responsibility” demanded that we not reprint the cartoon again. But today’s events show — if anybody should be in doubt — that the radical Islamists do not care in the least about such statements, and that it is completely useless to expect that these people who are prepared to kill for a drawing can be reached with common sense. Therefore the only consequence of “responsibility” is self-censorship, and thereby success for those who want religious dogma to decide what can be drawn, discussed, and criticized in Denmark. Let me therefore bring Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon here to the blog as a message of sympathy for a person who has lost his freedom and risked his life for this drawing.
[Nothing follows]
1 comment:
It is all fine and well and good for Westergaard's cartoon to appear in the online version of this paper, but true defiance requires that it appear in the print version, where it will be in Muslims' faces whether they like it or not.
Those with long memories will recall that only three major metro dailies in the U.S. had the integrity to print any of the Motoons in their coverage of the February 2006 uproar over them:
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Austin American-Statesman
The Rocky Mountain News *
The rest, including the paper I worked for, demurred amid a chorus of weasel words.
* The Rocky, tragically, went bust and shut down in February of last year.
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