Note on That Harper’s Cover

Several of you wrote in to disabuse me of the temporary paranoia caused by multiple articles on the removal of the June Harper's in Canada citing the cartoons inside the magazine and never mentioning the cartoons on the cover, making me think the cover might have been changed. Two of you were even nice enough to lead me to a blog discussing the cover (click through the image) and some of the interior cartoons, which makes me not only temporarily paranoid but I guess Internet-search deficient.

There's nothing majorly new to this story, where about 3000 copies of the magazine were withdrawn from 260 stores because of fears of violence caused by the reprinting of the original 12 Danish cartoons and some related work in an article by Art Spiegelman, by a distributor that five years ago famously pulled Mein Kampf because of its status as "hate literature." This on the heels of a pitiful showing by Western press last Winter in publishing these cartoons when they became the cause of riots in Europe, Asia and Africa earlier this year, which many critics feel was motivated by fear rather than a judicious choice between directly educating their readers and upsetting Muslim groups. American bookstores of similar status as of now are still carrying the magazine, which is surprising considering the relative appetite for brutal, print political discourse in each country.

On the other hand, I'm guessing this is the most times that the word "foment" has appeared in newspapers since the late 1930s.
 
posted 2:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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