Why did Yale University Press remove images of
Mohammed from a book about the Danish cartoons?
The Cartoons That Shook the World by Jytte
Klausen.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
extremismparticularly Muslim religious
extreemismthat is spreading across our culture.
A book called The Cartooons 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. (The competition was itself
a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish
publisher to release a book for children about
the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give
offense.) By the time the hysteria had been
called off by those who incited it, perhaps as
many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed.
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 other historic
illustrations of the likeness of the Prophet,
including one by Gustave Doré of the passage in
Dante's Inferno that shows Mohammed being
disemboweled in hell. (These same Dantean stanzas
have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro
Botticelli, Salvador DalÃ, 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.)
<http://www.slate.com/id/2225504/>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/08/why-yale-press-shouldnt-self-censor.htm>monochrom
at 8/18/2009 01:26:00 PM
