
How many times must I learn the lesson not to read
the newspaper first thing in the morning, but instead to do
the Daily Office from the
Book of Common Prayer with its selected Bible readings?
What upset me while having my morning tea was
this story and the that fact that Canada's largest bookstore chain, Indigo-Chapters, is refusing to carry the Western Standard for republishing the Mohammed cartoons.
Carly Weeks and Mike Blanchfield write:
The decision by an Alberta magazine to publish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad has stoked fears of attacks on Canadian troops and embassies abroad, caused a major Muslim group to consider asking police to lay hate-crime charges and led the country's largest bookstore chain and airline to withdraw the publication.
Amazon.ca just won my considerable online business away afrom Chapters.ca.
Of course Indigo has the right to make this business decision. So does Air Canada. It is not the same thing as a federal or provincial government clamping down on the magazine under hate crimes legislation
as at least one Muslim organization is planning to do. (Thanks to Kathy Shaidle over at
Relapsed Catholic for the link.)
As I've said earlier, I can understand why Muslims would consider the cartoons offensive. If the Western Standard were running the cartoons as editorial comment I would be joining them in the protests. But the magazine is running the cartoons to show people what is at the heart of a controversial news story that has dominated the world for almost two weeks.
I know Ezra Levant. If anti-Semitic cartoons were sparking a similar controvery, he would be the first to print them and he is an observant Jew. An
Egyptian newspaper reprinted the cartoons last October during Ramadan for the same reason. The riots are not against the Danish cartoons, but fomented by radical Islamists using faked cartoons as a deliberate attempt at information warfare and psychological intimidation.
Ezra Levant writes on
the Shotgun blog:
Anything that could cause subscriptions to be cancelled or advertisers to be scared off is dangerous to the bottom line. And then there is the risk of violence. What publisher needs that? That's fair. Freedom of the press can mean the right to ignore a story, too.
But I believe Canadian publishers and TV producers have not been fully candid about the choice they've all made. Not a single publisher, editor or reporter has admitted they have blocked the cartoons for fear of an economic backlash. Perhaps none of them thought about lost business when they made their decision. But if any did, they probably wouldn't admit it -- that would make them seem like callow, profit-driven commercial journalists, and that's contrary to the careful image the media has cultivated as being somehow more noble or idealistic than other industries.
And none of them have admitted what we all know is true, at least a little bit: That these riots are scary.
They're scarier than any letter-writing campaign or boycott or protest rally that has occurred in recent memory.
Journalists and other artists have been killed by Muslim radicals. Several of the Danish cartoonists are in hiding, for fear of assassination. This is really happening.
In fact, the official excuse has been that TV producers, publishers and editors don't want to offend religious sensibilities. But this isn't credible. Not a day goes by when the mainstream media doesn't offend the religious sensibilities of religious Christians, Jews or others. The media doesn't care about religious sensibilities -- it is militantly secular. But it has made an exception for the sensibilities of one religion that is quick to riot and behead its critics.
The most laughable excuse -- especially from the liberal, secular media like the CBC or CNN -- is that they "respect" Islam too much. Really? They respect a religion opposed to feminism, gay rights and abortion?
The liberal media doesn't respect radical Islam. It is afraid of radical Islam.
I'm afraid, too. A little bit at least. But courage isn't the absence of fear. It's not letting fear trump everything else -- like character or duty or our own beliefs.
I, too, believe fear is at the base of the decisions not to broadcast and not to print.
And I agree the mainstream media is militantly secular. I used to work at the CBC. I know.
Freedom of speech means having to tolerate speech and art and other expressions that offend us. It means vigorous debate. And the CBC will be first out of the gate to defend the rights of artists to depict pedophilia. It will be the first to cry "separation of church and state" but, alas, not seemingly on the separation of mosque and state.
The CBC is extremely quick to disrespect the Christian faith.
So is Indigo-Chapters.
Any time I walk into a Chapters there is prominently displayed "literature" that offends me as a Christian. Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code is a prime example.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an article on the book in which one of Canada's foremost scholars on the Dead Sea Scrolls described the runaway bestseller as "hate literature" against the Christian faith. The book libels Opus Dei, the Catholic Church, and the Christian faith through presenting false "facts" posing as history.
That is only one of probably hundreds of books I could find in the big box store that offend me and overtly blaspheme my faith. Even its "Christian" section is full of attacks on my faith.
Any move towards anti-blasphemy laws or tightening of hate laws to prevent religious groups from being offended will only serve to prevent any criticism of the Muslim faith, while still allowing open season on Christianity. If such a law is passed, and you bet your booties it is coming, I will try to use it to ban every offensive bit against Christianity too as a political point until the law is repealed. That means if a book uses dialog that says the Lord's Name in vain, then it is toast.
Another double standard upsets me. There seems to be a tiptoeing around publishing or broadcasting pictures of the cartoons for fear of triggering more violence in the Muslim world, but no compunction about showing the video of British soldiers beating some Iraqi teenagers as shown on the National last night, or last year's showing ad nauseum the photos showing abuse of prisoners in
Abu Ghraib. Those pictures also triggered violence in the Middle East. Yet in those instances, journalists defend their "obligation" to print those pictures.
It is probably because they do not fear a midnight knock on the door and beheading from the U.S. government as much as they like to complain the NSA might be reading their email. And I've wondered why there were never pictures showing Saddam Hussein's henchmen feeding dissidents into the shredder or anything approaching equivalence to show how much worse the torture was under his regime. No, the self-hating representatives of western civilization think there is moral equivalence and that George W. Bush is the worst terrorist on the planet.
It seems the standard operating is that news organizations will run with the stories and damn the consequences if they hurt the United States or the war effort, even if they have to run with a false story about
Koran abuse, (which also sparked riots abroad) as Newsweek did.
And I'm also dismayed by our new government's lack of a robust defence of what I used to believe were Canadian values of freedom of speech. Yes, that freedom should be exercised responsibly and people have a right to censure, boycott, write petitions, demonstrate peacefully to register their objections to speech they don't like.
But please, let us leave the government out of it. Let's have the hate laws pertain only to the actual incitement to violence and hatred--such as some of those signs saying infidels should be beheaded for printing the cartoons.