Threatened by jihadist killers, we debate with ourselves

After declining to publish the Muhammad cartoons, the Phoenix, a leading alternative paper in Boston, plainly stated the reason why:

Our primary reason is fear of retaliation from … bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do…. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and … could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history.

Jeff Jacoby praises the Phoenix’s editors for their honesty and berates them for their failure to stand up to thugs, while L-dotters ooh and ahh about Jacoby’s “spot-on” column.

The trouble is, neither the Phoenix nor Jacoby (not to mention the L-dotters) have thought beyond this self-involved liberal drama, in which the courageous defense of free speech is posed against the fearful surrender of free speech. Namely, they haven’t focused on why there is anything to fear in the first place: the fact that, solely as a result of immigration, there is now a population residing in this country that is using threats of beheadings to prevent newspapers from publishing materials that they would otherwise publish. True, the editors of the Phoenix speak of “bloodthirsty Islamists” who are threatening their lives, but they take their presence in this country entirely for granted. The editors’ focus is on the question, “What do we dare say, what do we dare print?” instead of on the question, “What are those people doing here? How could we have allowed people into our country who seek to rule us by religiously sanctioned terror and murder? And why, now that we know what these people are, are we allowing them to remain here?”

Nor does the only sane answer to those questions occur to the Phoenix’s editors or Jacoby, namely: “This is totally unacceptable. Anyone making such threats, anyone part of an organization making such threats, anyone voicing support of people making such threats, must be arrested, stripped of his immigration privileges, and deported from this country.” But no, the lefties at the Phoenix hunker down in fear, while the “conservative” Jacoby manfully tells them not to be afraid, and the L-dotters applaud Jacoby for his outspokenness and courage. All the participants in this drama ignore the actual cause of the fear, and none of them even remotely imagines the only way to remove it.

And so it will remain, as long as liberalism rules.

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PBS Watcher writes:

I believe the Phoenix episode is more calculated. The Phoenix was faced with an acute case of the dilemma posed to all of the left. Showing the cartoons in all their devastating mildness would radically undermine the characterization of Islam as the religion of peace. That would play directly into the hands of conservatives. With no history of sensitivity to anything, the excuse of wishing to be inoffensive would seem disingenuous and probably rankled their staff. Better to hope that pleading a real threat would let them off the hook without arousing reaction than to allow the cartoons to be seen and remove all doubt as to the degree of capitulation, thus perhaps awakening the sleeping populace to the real threat. I believe this is the general strategy simultaneously arrived at by all the major U.S. media. See this.

Something like what PBS Watcher alleges had occurred to me, but to keep things from getting too complicated I wanted, initially at least, to take the Phoenix’s explanation at face value.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 19, 2006 09:07 PM | Send