Remember that poor cartoonist and his Danish newspaper that had the audacity to publish some marginally funny cartoons depicting the Prophet? They weren’t much worse than what we see depicting our highest elected officials in America in our daily newspapers. They certainly didn’t rival the sort of thing we see vilifying priests and ministers in the US when atheists are making a point about something or other infringing upon their right to infringe on other’s rights. They were pretty innocuous and not all that disrespectful or humorous. Pointing out that Mohammed was increasingly being used as justification for beheading infidels and blowing up hundred of innocents to spread the true faith didn’t seem like that big a stretch.
But, riots ensued. Death penalties were issued by fatwa. It was messy to say the least.
Frankly, I’m sick of tolerating these primitives. Someone needs to give them a time out and teach them the childhood rhyme “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me or the Prophet.” We don’t need to go out of our way to be offensive, but we also don’t need to bend over backwards toward Mecca five times a day to avoid any possibility of offending this crowd’s excessive sensibilities.
Take a look at this short piece:
No Book Reviews Today
It refers to the much more detailed item published in the Wall Street Journal:
A "Stupid Piece of Work"
Did you get all of that? It is a NOVEL. That means it is even less responsible for being honest and truthful than the typical Michael Moore movie. It is fiction.
It is carefully researched fiction, arguably in the genre of Gore Vidal’s seminal works. The author is a scholar. She made the effort to learn Arabic. She expresses a view of the beauty of the love story. But none of that apparently matters.
Random House is no small publisher. They liked the work enough for a $100K advance! That is big bucks for an unpublished author’s first work. The “publication date” was scheduled for August 12th, so all of the work is done. They’ve got cases of books sitting in a warehouse ready to ship. Their money expended is well beyond the advance. I’m betting it is in the quarter million dollar range. And, they’ve been intimidated into pulling the plug by a bunch of raghead thugs.
C’mon folks this needs to be shouted from the rooftops. We need to express outrage and stand against it. At the very least Random House is missing the boat on this opportunity. Remember Salmon Rushdie? His Satanic Verses was no love story and for that matter it wasn’t even very readable prose. Yet, the death threats and fatwa publicity got him into the big numbers and made him a millionaire. The buzz of potential violence and controversy over the book insures top ten on the NYT Best Seller’s List for months. Frankly, I’d be willing to take the risk.
The risk taking would be sweetened every time I remembered that standing up for the book would be making a huge statement about America and our First Amendment freedoms as well. That is worth fighting for.
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