Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update

* the Danish Cartoons were published in Jyllands-Posten four years ago today. The newspaper's actions would go down in history as an incredibly effective blow for Free Speech, shaming several organizations around the world and huge swathes of their membership into reconsidering their extreme views on the depictions of Muhammad and other religious icons. Or not.

* it's International Blasphemy Day, where children around the world leave jars of urine in which soak pictures of Jesus on the mantle, where they are collected and exchanged for slightly less upsetting gifts by Salman Rushdie, who flies between IBD-observant homes on wings made from sewn-together Muhammad Cartoons. The Telegraph remains skeptical it will ever catch on. And yes, they chose this day because of the first bulleted item.

* Yale University gears up for what one hopes to be a spectacularly boring Thursday. I still don't get how Yale is so hot to protect its students that on the one hand their press couldn't publish any depictions of Muhammad in a book about depictions of Muhammad because of some perceived risk that seems to go directly against the theories of the book they're publishing, and yet the same over-protective standard of better safe than sorry that emerges isn't applied to any other area of discourse hosted by the campus.

I might find this professor's explanation that the Press and the University are such different entities that of course they have different standards more convincing if a) the safety of the university of its students wasn't flaunted in explanations for the images being dropped (protecting the YUP employees doesn't really tug at the heartstrings the same way), b) you didn't get articles like this explaining how the school is bringing all of its entities closer together, and c) the implied line of thinking that refusing to publish the imagery the author selected to best make her book informative and truthful is a natural extension of editing, and that meanwhile having high-profile and controversial people on campus is merely some sort of accidental, natural development of general free speech values necessary to a college campus is flat-out asinine.
 
posted 8:20 am PST | Permalink
 

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