
No apology from me
Several years ago I was speaking somewhere and someone in the audience challenged me for having the notorious caricature of Muhammad with his bomb in his turban, above, on the sidebar of this website. He said that while he opposed the advancing jihad and Islamic supremacism, he wanted to conduct his opposition respectfully, and not do anything that offended Muslims gratuitously.
What he failed to realize, of course, was that Islamic supremacist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood use the claim that they are offended precisely in order to cow and intimidate people like him. They label offensive any honest analysis of how jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to recruit Muslims into waging war against unbelievers, so as to stifle such analyses. Once the West starts acquiescing to Muslim calls for censorship in the name of avoiding giving offense, it is enabling the effort to render it mute and defenseless in the face of the jihad.
Hence the cartoon above. I will never apologize for publishing it here. Freedom of speech is the only bulwark against tyranny.
“Danish paper apologises to Muslims in cartoon row,” from USA Today, February 26 (thanks to Joseph):
Danish daily Politiken on Friday apologised to Muslims for possibly offending them by reproducing cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in 2008, but said it did not regret publishing the drawings.
“We apologise to anyone who was offended by our decision to reprint the cartoon drawing,” the newspaper said in a statement.
Politiken is the first Danish newspaper to formally apologise to those who may have resented the publication of the cartoons.
It published on Friday an agreement reached with eight organisations from Australia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories representing 94,923 descendants of the Muslim prophet.
What kind of agreement? What was agreed upon?
In the agreement Politiken said it regretted if it had insulted Muslims’ faith, but that it did not regret publishing the drawings and that it did not renounce the right to publish the controversial drawings again.
The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Toeger Seindenfaden, said he was happy with the outcome.
“We deplore that Muslims were offended even if that was not our intention,” he told AFP.
Friday’s agreement emerged from an August 28 request made by a Saudi lawyer, Faisal Ahmed Zaki Yamani, to 11 Danish newspapers.
He had asked the newspapers to apologise, promise they would not republish the drawings, and remove the controversial cartoons from their websites.
Politiken’s apology was widely condemned by Danish politicians, who charged that the paper had caved in to pressure and had sacrificed freedom of expression, which is considered a cornerstone of Danish democracy.
A number of other Danish newspapers also condemned the apology, but said they would not republish the cartoons.
Jyllands-Posten, which first published the 12 caricatures of Mohammed in September 2005, blasted Politiken’s decision.
“It’s a sad day for Danish media, it’s sad for freedom of expression and it’s sad for Politiken,” Jyllands-Posten chief editor Joern Mikkelsen wrote….
Indeed.