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February 14, 2006
The Prophet (PBUH) Comes to Canada
Finally, someone has the guts to reprint the entire set of Muhammed cartoons that have literally ignited the Muslim world. Unfortunately, everyone from Indigo Books to our own Defence Minister is either shying away or criticizing the decision altogether. For shame.
It is one thing for a news organization to say that they will not republish the cartoons in the context of, say, in the opinion pages, because they do not square with the organization's editorial policy, and that's perfectly fine. But now these images are at the centre of an international news story, and the response from Canada's news media has been to cover the story without covering its key component. It would be like reporting on the Iraq War without showing Saddam Hussein, or the Cuban Missile Crisis without showing Kennedy and Khrushchev, or the US entry into WWI without showing the Zimmerman telegraph. Nobody's suggesting that to publish these images is to agree that Muhammed's got the bomb on the brains here. The naked emperor wouldn't be such a big deal, if it wasn't for everyone else shutting up about it.
And Defence Minister O'Connor, I think Colby Cosh said it best:
My own view is that if we're not free to say fuck Islam, then we're not free, period. My apologies to any Canadian diplomats abroad whose lives and property may be endangered by a simple statement of the essential credo of liberalism.
Indeed, if we feel that we perhaps should limit our freedoms, so that we may hope to appease murderous Islamists who are already bent on killing our soldiers and civilians, then I question why we should send them there in the first place.
Full disclosure: I get a free subscription to the Western Standard because I am a contributor to the Shotgun blog (although I haven't actually done any actualy “contributing” for quite some time).
Posted by Kelvin at February 14, 2006 3:24 PM
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