Challenging The MSM

See below from today's Boston Globe. American media is more connected than any entity I know. And surely there is strength in numbers. As the cracks start to form and more and more publications are willing to come forward and admit their true concern, than why not band together as the unified force for good and even change you can be at your best?

“A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad. . . . Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.” -- Albert Camus

Pick a day, co-ordinate as you will. That needn't even be done in public view. Name it for freedom, or name it for unity, or name it as you will. But stand together nationally, with as much scope as you can, and make a clear statement against intimidation and threat and jointly publish the cartoons.

The alternative will only be ever more editorials like the one below and a nation that won't believe you when you tell us of the value of freedom of expression, for which you especially purport to stand. If you lack the courage of conviction to stand up for the very principles upon which our free press was formed, than you relinquish the right to expect others to defend you in the face of any coming storm.

Rationalizations notwithstanding, the refusal of the US media to show the images at the heart of one of the most urgent stories of the day is not about restraint and good taste. It's about fear. Editors and publishers are afraid the thugs will target them as they targeted Danny Pearl and Theo van Gogh; afraid the mob will firebomb their newsrooms as it has firebombed Danish embassies. ''We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible," an imam in Gaza preaches. ''Whoever insults a prophet, kill him," reads the sign carried by a demonstrator in London. Those are not figures of speech but deadly threats, and American newspapers and networks are intimidated.

Journalists can be incredibly brave, but when it comes to covering the Arab and Muslim world, too many news organizations have knuckled under to threats. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, a veteran foreign correspondent, admitted long ago that ''physical intimidation" by the PLO led reporters to skew their coverage of important stories or to ignore them ''out of fear." Similarly, CNN's former news executive, Jordan Eason, acknowledged after the fall of Saddam Hussein that his network had long sanitized its news from Iraq, since reporting the unvarnished truth ''would have jeopardized the lives of . . . our Baghdad staff."

Like the Nazis in the 1930s and the Soviet communists in the Cold War, the Islamofascists are emboldened by appeasement and submissiveness.

Comments

[Lone Pony]

Dan, I wrote about this yesterday. I was so upset I was shaking. I wrote about taking a picture of my bare ass for the MSM and radical Islamics. Pretty upset for me! In your words, a sweet, seemingly innocent young school teacher. Geeze, wake up people!

[Armed_and_CHristian]

Dan;

Count me in, as I'm posting the J-P cartoons and then some whenever the whim takes me.
If I can convince Lone Pony to send me a photo of her gluteus maximus, I'll use that in a Muhammed cartoon, too!

[pdq]

Umm...is there any purpose to reprinting these cartoons other than
to prove we're tough and poke a finger in the eye of Muslims? This
"free speech" argument seems a little stretched to me- most of these
cartoons are viewable on the internet, and our government is
certainly not preventing their publication.

On the other hand, these cartoons _are_ deeply offensive to many
Muslims- sort of like, I don't know...if someone photoshopped a
depiction of Jesus having gay sex. Would you be cheering on the
widespread publication of those, in the name of "free speech"?

[Phoenix]

I know the perfect ass to use. sondrak

[Phoenix]

I was wishy-washy about this way back in the beginning happy that the blogs were showing them. I thought, cool, you guys won't show them...the bloggers aren't. Now after some time, I have changed my thoughts completely.

But the kicker for me is that we've let an ally down. Denmark has stood alone in this, and we wimps haven't made the first move to support them. They have troops in Iraq at our behest. ! They've been threatened and they are close - unlike us - to the intimidation and violence. What an empty bag of promises we are if we cannot stand behind one small country that supports us with vigor and determination.

Lastango at Daily Pundit has an excellent piece on this. I read it and felt a combination of outrage and shame that our country looks the size of Denmark while Denmark looks the size of us.

(Dan....I don't know how to do links... But that is an excellent article. Extremely comprehensive!)

[Jordan]

Would you be cheering on the
widespread publication of those, in the name of "free speech"?

If Christians threatened bombings and beheadings in response, you bet your ass I would. Many Islamists find the idea of women having any kind of career offensive, too. Shall we fire all of the women reporters to prove just how tolerant we are while we're bending over backwards for these savages?

[pdq]

>"If Christians threatened bombings and beheadings in response, you bet your ass I would."

Bull.

>"Shall we fire all of the women reporters..."

Somehow I must have missed their demand to have all Western women unemployed.

Sorry, but I don't see this whole brouhaha being about Muslims trying to dictate how we live- it's about their most revered and holy religious symbol, being used as an insult, in a manner which they would consider blasphemous in itself (that is, any depiction of the human form, much less Mohammed himself)

>"...bending over backwards for these savages?"

Exactly how are we "bending over backwards"? Neither the Danes nor any other government in the Western world has tried to censor these depictions. I understand that the fact they haven't been plastered across every front page is irritating to you, but that's a free choice of the publishers, liberal, conservative, and in-between, who no doubt have weighed the pros and cons of publishing something so deeply offensive to millions of people.

Regarding the "threats of bombings and beheadings", it's unfortunate that those kind of extremist voices get heard at all...but frankly, there are idiots on all sides, including semi-mainstream Christian ones who (for instance) call for the assassination of foreign leaders who they personally don't care for.

That's their right to free speech too, I suppose. I think reasonable people of all persuasions do well to speak out against hateful speech intended to incite violence, or failing that, to ignore it.

[Jordan]

>>"If Christians threatened bombings and beheadings in response, you bet your ass I would."

>Bull.

Can't argue with that logic.

And this is what's irritating to me:

>THE PHOENIX is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly >that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have >been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world. Its willingness to push the envelope >was memorably demonstrated in 2002, when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of >Daniel Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the sickening video of the Wall >Street Journal reporter's beheading.

>But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a brutally candid editorial it >explained why.

>''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, is ''fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty >Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, >we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at >the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend >to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history."

And this:

>For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in >Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in >Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries.

>"They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British >Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.

So, yeah I think it is about Muslims dictating how we live. And to publish daily reports about the uproar over these cartoons and not even publish the cartoons which are responsible for the uproar is absurd.

Links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/19/nsharia219.xml
http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2006/02/19/when_fear_cows_the_media/

[Jordan]

And there's this:

"European Union mulls media code after cartoon protests"
http://www.newkerala.com/news2.php?action=fullnews&id=5918

And this:
According to Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish security services (Säpo), in collusion with Foreign Minister Leila Freivalds, have forced the website SD-Kuriren offline for publishing the Jyllands-Posten cartoons (SD-Kuriren is the house organ of the hard-right Swedish Democrats).

“We think that this was the best decision after we were contacted by the Foreign Ministry and Säpo,” Anna Larsson, vice president of hosting compant Levonline, told DN. Freivalds told DN that “it is terrible that a small group of extremists are exposing Swedes to danger [by reprinting the cartoons].”
http://www.spectator.se/stambord/?p=1100

And this:
The Cadre, UPEI's student newspaper has published the twelve infamous editorial cartoons that criticized aspects of Islam.

At the request of president Wade MacLauchlan, university administrators have removed all 2,000 copies of the paper from campus.

The campus police also showed up at the office of Ray Keating, the paper's editor, and asked that he hand over any copies in his possession, a request he refused to comply with. Read Keating's editorial here.

The UPEI Student Union has withdrawn support of this week's issue of The Cadre and has also stated that Weblogs@UPEI "are no longer accepting comments on the cartoon issue" CTV's Steve Murphy noted during his broadcast tonight that it appears that they are now "censoring discussion about censorship".
http://www.stevejanke.com/archives/156645.php

UPEI is a Canadian public university.

So don't tell me Western governments aren't censoring them as well.