The Dish

Here’s a great series of cartoons from around the world on the attempts to suppress the work of other cartoonists. It’s a perfect response to the bullies and fanatics who, I might add, are also busy intimidating other Muslims who are more relaxed about these things. If you want to see what the New York Times won’t allow you to see, click here. Let freedom reign – despite the best efforts of the mainstream media.

A reader wonders if the West will continue to be able to publish Dante:

"In the discussion over Islam, cartoons, and religious intolerance, has anyone chimed in about Dante?  Or have the fanatics already boarded buses and planes for Italy?

In any case, in Canto 28, Page 237, line 30, Mohammed must spend eternity tearing himself apart, for that is his punishment in Hell.   

Consistent with medieval Christian thinking, in which the Muslim world was viewed as a hostile usurper, Dante depicts both Mohammed and his cousin and son-in-law Ali as sowers of religious divisiveness. Dante creates a vicious composite portrait of the two holy men, with Mohammed’s body split from groin to chin and Ali’s face cleft from top to bottom."

Berlusconi needs to offer an apology, no? Or will the mobs now descend on Rome?

Jpod makes a good point. The real reason that many mainstream papers will not publish any of the Danish cartoons is that the owners and editors feel rightly responsible for the safety of their employees. A decision to publish puts a lot of people at risk for their lives. An individual blogger may feel free to put herself at risk, but an editor and publisher have broader responsibilities. I just wish the MSM were honest about this and confessed that they are making a decision based on legitimate fear of violence against them. That would clarify things, at least. If the NYT can publish "Piss-Christ" and the Virgin Mary made out of dung, then it cannot logically claim to be a paper dedicated to respecting religious sensitivity. It respects religious sensitivity when the religious threaten violence. And this stance therefore rewards the violence. Where am I wrong here?

"Not a good day to be blonde in Beirut," – a British woman, caught up in the anti-Western rioting in Lebanon. What I love is the distinction made by Islamist mobs. It’s ok to attack an innocent Dane, because he happens to share the same nationality as a newspaper editor, but not an innocent Brit. They’re taking lessons in logic from the New York Times.

Check out the BBC’s website treatment of the respective histories of Christianity and Islam. A former BBC CEO noticed something. There’s one obvious difference between them. The people who wrote up the history of Islam are far more deferential to religious sentiment. Since when does the BBC insist on writing "peace be upon him" after every reference to the Prophet Muhammad? They demonstrate no such piety when discussing Judaism or Christianity. And this is one element that will at some point have to be tackled: Christianity has been reshaped and challenged by scholarly revisionism with respect to the books that became the Bible. We know far more now than we used to about how the Gospels were written, what influenced them, their cultural context, their political objectives, and so on. There is much less scholarship, especially in Islamic countries, about the origins of the Koran. We need more scholarship. And for that, we need less fear, and … freedom. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong," – G. K. Chesterton.

An interesting perspective.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how this war has so often come down to what we are and are not allowed to see. We were not allowed to see (for long) the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the U.S. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see the cartoons that are being used by Islamists for another round of violent intimidation of free societies.

And then, of course, there is what makes this war different. The web has made it possible to see almost all of this, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pics are actually out of view for most people – and, even then, some have been kept back by editors, who see their job as preventing the flow of information, rather than enabling it. And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward, to become an arbiter of sensitivity and good taste. And it’s up to places like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, images and informed opinions. Obviously, I don’t see the need to publish everything. And editorial judgment counts. But we are approaching a time when the MSM may have that as precisely its role – not as a source of informaton, but as an arbiter of social etiquette and good judgment. The NYT as Miss Manners.

It is a myth that Islam has not allowed depictions of the Prophet. It is a myth that ridicule of religion is impermissible in Islam. Amir Taheri and "Omar" below make this clear:

The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of "laughing at religion," at times to the point of irreverence.

So, in refusing to publish the cartoons at issue, the American media are simply following the line not of Islam but of radical Islamists, who engineered this outbreak of violence in the first place. Of course, even if the images violated a religious taboo, that’s no reason not to print them. What journalists print should be designed to provide news and data for readers, not to assuage extremist religious sensibilities. Would the NYT refuse to depict a Terence McNally play because of fierce opposition by Christianists? Of couse not. So why the double standard? Or is one of the criteria for journalism now not relevance to a global story but conformance to religious sensibility?

"Callous" is a very strong word for the cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten. But that’s how the New York Times critic has described the banal sketches in a newspaper that will not publish the material it is criticizing:

"They’re callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression."

"Cheap points"? It’s a "cheap point" to illustrate the climate of fear and intimidation that free artists and writers live under in Europe when tackling the issue of Islam. It’s "cheap" after the fatwa against
Salman Rushdie, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the police protection for many others, now including the editors of Jyllands-Posten. Choosing sides between those who would murder and kill and those who would simply draw and provoke is, for Michael Kimmelman "exasperating." After all, the newspaper that published them could be broadly described as "conservative". "Conservative" in a land where the welfare state is well to the left of America’s Democratic party. The pusillanimity of the New York Times on this subject is another low-mark for the paper. They have the gall to run vicious commentary on images they will not publish. Below are two images: one of the Virgin Mary constructed out of dung and supported by public funding; and one of the "callous" Danish cartoons, that pokes fun at the newspaper that ran them. The NYT will publish one but not the other. They are not journalists. They are merely cowards.