Remember those Muhammad cartoons that caused all that violence? Jytte Klausen wrote an academic book about the cartoons that covers much of the politics that went into the reaction to it. This is the kind of book that's peer reviewed and probably not the kind of book that most of us would pick up at the local bookshop.
Anyway, the book was all set to be published by the Yale University Press when somebody at the publisher started wondering if the book itself would incite more violence, so they asked a panel of experts who all agreed that it would. The thing is, the experts they consulted didn't actually read the book.
So now they are publishing a book about the cartoons without the cartoons in it. In reference to the cartoons a woman on NPR is quoted as saying; "People don't see this the same way they would see a swastika or they would see the N-word. They see bigotry against Muslims in a separate category as they see bigotry against other races or religions."
But in this country would we require an author to take the swastika out of a book about the Nazis? I know the N-word is left in a lot of the older books at our library. Nobody is protesting Tom Sawyer as hate speech. This is an issue of free speech and not an issue of bigotry.
The NPR article.
3 comments:
Context. Where is the context? We don't trust ourselves and others to think. Because many of us don't think. Hence the hatred in the first place. So let's not talk about it honestly in case somebody comes in at the wrong time and gets wound up.....Madness.
It just seems wrong to me that the panel made this decision without reading the book. Like you said, context is important.
I'm in favor of resonpsible speech. And the decision here is ridiculous when it is based on uninformed opinion. The presence of the cartoons alone isn't a fair basis to remove them without reading the context in which they are presented.
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