I canceled my subscription to the Philadelphia Inquirer a little over a year ago in the wake of a vile, anti-Semitic editorial cartoon by Tony Auth but recent events may cause me to rethink my cancelation. It seems as though the Inqy was the first major city American newspaper (excluding the New York Sun, which doesn’t quite count as a major paper) to publish a single one of the “offensive” Mohammed cartoons. Bravo, editorial board of the Inquirer. Now, please print the other eleven cartoons for all to see, protests or not.
Of course, the fact that the whole affair appears to be an conspiracy organized by radical Danish imams to stir up trouble(!) makes me want to support the Inquirer even further.
Call your local papers and ask them why they’ve chosen to leave you in the dark on such an important issue.
Go Go Hometown Paper!
I personally am waiting for more outcry like I saw in Slate by Christopher Hitchens (http://www.slate.com/id/2135499/ )
. In a nutshell, it boiled down to the following:
Yes, we get that drawing images of the prophet is not allowed in Islam. Yes, you would have as much a right to be upset at their publication as the Israeli’s do at cartoons in YOUR papers. So demand an apology or a retraction, but realizing that in a free world, you may get neither. Because even though you don’t eat pork – We can. And we can draw whetever we want, and it is up to the press whether to publish – not you, or any government. So get over it.
To me, this is purely an issue of boycott – if you don’t like a product, don’t partake. You don’t like what’s on channel 9? Change the channel, or stop watching tv altogether. Don’t demand special treatment to suit your sensibilities, and definitely don’t go making threats.
I agree with the Islamic moderates out there, who are making the wonderful (and of course, obvious) point: All you people out there who are so outraged that you are rioting and otherwise disrupting the peace, over a cartoon, are just prooving the radicalism that the west is against is rampant uncontrollable.
Of course, my hometown paper would juct come out in support of Bush nuking the place. Such is life in a red zone…