Nothing to see here. Move along. Nobody here but us technical errors. “Publisher says ‘technical error’ led to omission of part of book critical of Islam,” from Helsingin Sanomat, with thanks to Fjordman:
The Finnish translation of a controversial book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born member of the Dutch Parliament, has a passage missing, in which the writer sharply criticises the founder of Islam – the Prophet Mohammed.
The book is a collection of essays and interviews. The missing passage is from an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, published on December 25th, 2003. The interview was part of the newspaper’s series on the Ten Commandments.
Hirsi Ali said that the Finnish publisher of the book, Otava Publishers, had asked for permission to omit the passage, because it might be found to be offensive by Muslims.
However, she did not give permission for any such omission.
At Otava, Tero Norkola, head of publishing at the company”s non-fiction department, was unaware of the missing passage when Helsingin Sanomat contacted him. He said that he is certain that Otava did not deliberately order the cut.
Norkola was asked why he thought that the missing passage happened to be the one that has raised so much international controversy.
“It is interesting. Mysterious”, he admits. However, he insists that no decision was made to cut the passage, and that its omission must have been a “technical error”….
For safety reasons Otava omitted the name of the Finnish translator from the book. Translators” names have been left out of other versions as well….
In addition, the Finnish version contains Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s script for the short film Submission, which was directed by Theo van Gogh, who was later murdered by a Moroccan-born radical Muslim.
Hirsi Ali’s Paris-based agent did not know that the Finnish version did not contain the book’s most widely-quoted passage, in which she said that by Western standards, Mohammed was a “pervert and a tyrant” who opposed freedom of speech. She also says that Mohammed is the model for all Muslim men to follow, and suggests that this may be the reason why many Muslim men are violent.