Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Yale University Press Buys Into the Blame-the-Speaker Approach:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_16-2009_08_22.shtml#1250623296
[1]Christopher Hitchens' Slate column strikes me as quite right on
this (emphasis and first link added):
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 Cartoons That Shook the World, a book
about the Mohammed cartoon controversy], but it would remove from
it the [2]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 Dal�, 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.) ...
Islamic art contains many examples... of paintings of the Prophet,
and even though the Dante example is really quite an upsetting one,
exemplifying a sort of Christian sadism and sectarianism, there has
never been any Muslim protest about its pictorial representation in
Western art.
If that ever changes, which one can easily imagine it doing, then
Yale has already made the argument that gallery directors may use
to justify taking down the pictures and locking them away.
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." ...
It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the
news media -- and in the age of "the image" at that -- refused to
show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a
serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the
mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct
responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it
involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as
what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral
responsibility. [3]Last time this happened, I linked to the
[4]Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about
them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but
who's to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense
now. I deny 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.
As I mentioned [5]before, I have some sympathy for entities that
refuse to distribute the cartoons. I would not fault them too much for
that judgment, though "[i]t seems to me that leading bookstores [in
that instance, Borders and Waldenbooks], like leading universities,
need to take some risks -- and, yes, even risks that involve potential
risks to customers and employees -- in order to protect the
marketplace of ideas that sustains them."
Yet framing it as a matter of trying to avoid having "blood on [their]
hands" is, for the reasons Hitchens gives, deeply wrong, and
dangerous, because it lends Yale's credibility to the theory that we
have a moral imperative to shut up, not just that this is one
tolerable option. The next time someone does decide to publish the
cartoons, and thugs decide to react by rioting, the publisher can be
told, "Even Yale University Press agrees that what you did leaves you
with blood on your hands."
Is that the message that our leading academic institutions should be
sending? Not just that it's so easy to force Americans into silence,
but that the threat of criminal violence is enough to make us morally
obligated to be silent?
References
1. http://www.slate.com/id/2225504/
2. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_03_05-2006_03_11.shtml#1142035265
3. http://www.slate.com/id/2135499/
4. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=12146&offer=&hidebodyad=true
5. http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1143740348.shtml
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