More on the Cartoon Jihad

The rest is here.

When fear cows the media

By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
February 19, 2006

THE PHOENIX is Boston's leading ''alternative" newspaper, the kind of brash, pull-no-punches weekly that might have been expected to print without hesitation the Mohammed cartoons that Islamists have been using to incite rage and riots across the Muslim world. Its willingness to push the envelope was memorably demonstrated in 2002, when it broke with most media to publish a grisly photograph of Daniel Pearl's severed head, and supplied a link on its website to the sickening video of the Wall Street Journal reporter's beheading.

But the Phoenix isn't publishing the Mohammed drawings, and in a brutally candid editorial it explained why.

''Our primary reason," the editors confessed, 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."

UPDATE:

When I posted this yesterday I didn't include any comment of my own becuase I didn't know what to say. I can understand the editors of THE PHOENIX's decision. After all what if they ran the cartoons and the newspaper was bombed resulting in some person who's only job was to come in and sweep the floor being killed.

The thing is that this isn't where it stops, it is where it starts. The Islam lobby in the US already excercises de facto script approval over the output of the Amercian entertainment industry (note that even the producers of 24 caved last season). Now they are seeking the same power over the Free World's news media (this is the real point of the Cartoon Jihad). The ultimate goal is to subject the civilized world to the state of dhimmitude. Dhimmi is the term Muslems use to describe a Christian or a Jew who lives in an Islamic nation being governed by Islamic law. The Dhimmi is required to pay a special tax for the continued privlage (not right) of keeping his head attached to his body and he must endure a series of humiliating regulations designed to never let him forget that he in inferior in every way to Muslems. All too many citizens of the West seem willing to go along with this, starting with the US news media (but not, to their eternal credit the European media).

Here is a serving military officer's take on the issue:

This US Army officer who blogs at 4 Mile Creek has this to say about media outlets which publish the newly released Abu Ghraib photos:

If a news organization refuses to publish cartoons of Muhammed because they are "culturally sensitive", does it make sense that they would rush to publish new photos from Abu Ghraib? After all, the US Army, and the US government, have already acknowledged that prisoners in Abu Ghraib were tortured. The new pictures won't add to anyone's knowledge of what happened there.

So does that make sense?

Try this scenario instead, and see if it makes more sense.
News organizations that did publish the infamous Muhammed cartoons have drawn the wrath of thin-skinned, often well armed, and always violent, muslims. News organizations that didn't publish them, have simply whistled by the graveyard. But they made it by, nonetheless. So it wasn't out of sensitivity, it was simply out of fear. Fear of sacrifice. The Abu Ghraib pictures will result in no threat to themselves, only a renewed and perhaps increased threat against me and my fellow coalition soldiers here in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and other hotspots around the globe. No threat to their safety, just ours. So it's okay to print them.