Bostom: NYU’s Cartoonish Quarantine

Dr. Andrew Bostom writes in The American Thinker:

The late Richard Grenier’s book The Marrakesh One-Two was a trenchant fictional account of a doomed effort to film the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Grenier (pp.3-4) characterized the filmmakers’ basic predicament with biting wit:

"It’s going to be like The Mohammed Story, The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, like Mohammed Superstar. But Islam, a little detail, has this ferocious hostility to the graven image, rather well known in historical circles, and they don’t like tri-acetate either…There are places they’d kill you in a spirit of devoted piety for daring to represent the image of the Prophet. They take these things seriously…After conferring with the doctors [clerics] of Al Azzar [Al Azhar] in Cairo…we’ve got to cut out Mohammed. We’re doing the The Mohammed Story, you understand, but Mohammed’s got to go. Too holy to be portrayed. We’ve got to “shoot around” Mohammed. But also his immediate family has to go: This wealthy widow he married who gave him his start in life. All his ten or so other wives. His children, all the daughters. His famous sons-in-law. Ali goes. Omar goes. The four first caliphs go. Mohammed’s mother and father go. The ten companions of Mohammed go. That’s the ten apostles right there. Talk of Hamlet without the prince. This was Hamlet without the prince, king, queen, Ophelia, Polonious, Horatio, Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. It was going to be Hamlet with the gravediggers and Fortinbras. The only thing they would give me was I could have P.V. Mohammed. That is I could script shots from Mohammed’s Point of View, subjective camera. I could have faces reacting and people talking to Mohammed. But Mohammed couldn’t answer them because his voice would be too holy. I got to work it all in by hearsay. And Mohammed couldn’t cast a shadow. He was too holy to cast a shadow. That would be sacrilege too. Mohammed seems to have been about five foot four but when people speak to him in our movie they look up to him as if he’s the size of [6’11” former UCLA and NBA Hall of Fame basketball star] Bill Walton."

This past Wednesday evening, March 29, 2006, I participated in a panel discussion of the Danish cartoon jihad where life imitated (Grenier’s) art as depressing farce through the actions of the New York University Administration. The NYU Administration’s toxic combination of moral cowardice and absurd, offensive “reasoning” forced a Hobson’s choice upon the courageous NYU Objectivist Club student organizers of this important forum: If the cartoons were to be displayed, they could either limit admission to the event to the “NYU community” and exclude the over 150 off-campus guests who had registered to attend the event, or (as the students ultimately decided) to keep the event open to the (pre-registered) public, agree not to show the Danish cartoons. The FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) website has posted E-mails from NYU administrator Robert Butler on March 27 and 28 documenting this ultimatum.

And NYU spokesman John Beckman mimicked the pious wisdom of the Al Azhar “doctors” of The Marrakesh One-Two with this astonishing pronouncement:

"Realistically, one can have a discussion on smallpox without actually handing out the live virus to the audience."

As a physician and epidemiologist having studied both the historical impact of past infectious plagues, such as small pox, and managed real patients suffering from cruel, deadly viral illnesses still extant today, it is hard to comprehend the warped mindset that makes a glib analogy between deliberate exposure to a highly contagious, lethal virus capable of causing indiscriminate, mass death, and viewing twelve rather tame cartoons which might offend the sensibilities of some Muslims.

Sans cartoons, and amidst intensive (full metal jacket/body scan) security—(Whose “sensibilities” were offended by that state-of-siege requirement one might ask the NYU administrators? Were those same administrators aware that the unhinged, openly jihadist supporting British Muslim “journalist” Yvonne Ridley had personally intervened to foment Muslim student unrest at NYU?)—the panel discussion did proceed. Excellent blow by blow accounts of this enlightening evening are available from bloggers who attended. (Atlas Shrugged has provided the most detailed assessment)...

Read it all, news links in the original.