Confronting the enemy on the battleground of religious censorship is essential, especially when the lines are drawn on pages of scripture than oftentimes themselves deserve our contempt. Besides refusing to capitulate, and furnishing ourselves with a greater understanding not necessarily of what our aggressors thinks, but rather how they think, it is also imperative that we unite behind those accused.
Having kept abreast of this issue since the first riot outside the US embassy in Cairo last week, not once in online reports have I seen a hyperlink to the clip, 'The Innocence of Muslims', from any of the major news outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian, or CNN. This is shameful and a stark display of capitulation and cowardice. There is no legal conflict. I have linked to the video three times from this blog. Given the western media's utter reliance upon the tenets of free speech, one would expect a greater show of solidarity.
The internet has revolutionized the ways we access information, and that information frequently becomes news in itself. Regardless of the sensitivity or nature of the subject matter, reporters and newsgroups have a responsibility, if only for their audience, to reproduce that information.
I experienced this problem myself in 2008 when the campus newspaper in Arizona, the Daily Wildcat printed a cartoon satirizing American perceptions in the run-in to the presidential elections that depicted a man telling a neighbor: "We're voting for the nigger". The letters department in the newsroom was inundated with messages of disgust from students seemingly ignorant to the nuances of the piece. Despite my letter of complaint, the paper never reprinted the cartoons.
Similarly, in 2005 when a Danish magazine published 9 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, the only magazine to print the images in the United States was Free Inquiry. Borders bookstores summarily removed the magazine from its shelves.
A day or two ago I was directed to this piece in The Onion that, in their words, features "cherished figures from multiple religious faiths [...] depicted engaging in a lascivious sex act of considerable depravity." That's a start, but I can't remove from my mind the image of a man laughing at his own joke, showing-off a toothless grin in an ecstasy of bravado and self-congratulation. You'll note the inclusion of all figureheads of all the major religions with one telling omission.
Now is the time to reprint the cartoons, broadcast the films and documentaries on television, buy a Salman Rushdie novel, and keep reprinting and rebroadcasting until the Islamic militants and murderers lose count of targets to avenge.
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