Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar

Depressing when France is more courageous than the United States. But the truth hurts…witness this editor who was fired for publishing the cartoons in the French Newspaper France Soir. We are at war right now and since this is largely an ideological war, words matter. The ability to speak freely matters. Here is Flemming Rose commenting on the failure of the American Press to publish the cartoons in solidarity with the fight to keep speech free.

“It reads on the top of the New York Times, ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ but it’s very hard to argue that this was not news on February 1, 2006,” the culture editor of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, said Wednesday night during a speech at Stanford University. Most American newspapers did not publish the cartoons, which include images of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban and of suicide bombers being greeted by the Muslim prophet in heaven.

“Europe has usually been criticized for being politically correct and on the defense when it comes to Islam, but more European newspapers published the cartoons,” he said. “We might not have had the kind of ongoing crisis if more newspapers around the world would have published the cartoons at the same time because by doing so you would have drawn a clear line. … Instead, it was pretty unclear what people in liberal democracies thought of this issue.” Cartoon Editor Disillusioned With U.S. Press | The New York Sun

Our press grievously failed to live up to their responsibility of being the guardians of free speech. By appeasing the easily offended muslims they have ceded ground in our fight that we will not get back. We should have published those cartoons. Weasel little nothings like James David Dickson editor of The Michigan Review making sorry excuses for not living up to his responsibility did us no favors. Witness this poor excuse for failure and notice that it is the National Review that gives him a stage to embarrass himself. Did they agree with his stance?

The Danish cartoons arose from a desire to combat European self-censorship, but the almost-uniform refusal of American editors to reprint the cartoons speaks to the extent to which our press truly is free. In the case of The Michigan Review, this meant freedom from the sophomoric, macho impulse to offend for the sake of it, as if to pretend that discretion isn’t the better part of valor. Americans self-censor because we don’t see the need to offend; Europeans self-censor because they fear an Islamic backlash. The Danes profane the prophet Mohammed to include Muslims in their culture; we don’t profane Mohammed because, frankly, we wouldn’t do it to anyone else.

Absolutely incredible. This twit exercises his freedom by avoiding confrontation with those who would steal it away.

Here are the French, endlessly portrayed as cowards:

Under the headline “We have the right to caricature God,” a French newspaper today reprinted the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have ignited extraordinary anti-Danish protests, death threats and boycotts across the Muslim world. France Soir published the drawings, first printed by Jyllands-Posten, a right-of-centre Danish broadsheet last September, across pages four and five of this morning’s edition with an editorial that defended the freedom of the press. “The publication of 12 cartoons in the Danish press has shocked the Muslim world for whom the representation of Allah and his prophet is banned,” the newspaper said. “But because no religious dogma can impose its view on a democratic and secular society, France Soir publishes the incriminated cartoons.”