Yale Surrenders

The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn't even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture.

A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of "protest" and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

Yale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy. Not content with this, it is also removing those by Dante, William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin - so there's a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.
According to Yale logic, violence could result from the showing of the images—and not only that, but it would be those who displayed the images who were directly responsible for that violence.

Let me illustrate: The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press' surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has "never blinked" in the face of controversy, but "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question." [snip]

Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today.

Should some homicidal theocrat decide to take offense, I reject absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands.

He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it.

The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

[Just what are our young being taught from such stalwarts of American 'higher learning'.]

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[BTW:

Click each image to enlarge. [when you get to the site.]

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