Well, looks like the terrorists finally have won. The satirical French paper Charlie Hebdo announced it would no longer draw pictures of Muhammad, just six months after Islamic terrorists stormed their Paris offices and massacred the staff. They are far from alone in backing down in the face of such threats. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper whose Muhammad cartoons caused great turmoil in 2005, refused to publish any of Charlie Hebdo’s controversial cartoons.
The Jyllands-Posten editor who commissioned that earlier set of cartoons, Flemming Rose, wrote The Tyranny of Silence about the paper’s ordeal and has spent the intervening years issuing a cri de coeur about the need for free speech. When Rose was asked about the refusal to republish any of Charlie Hebdo’s work earlier this year, he was candid. “We caved in,” he told the BBC. “Violence works. . . . Sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen.”
Rose is admirably honest. Even Charlie Hebdo’s initial bravery has given way to a blame-spreading mentality that reflects the fact that the paper is now a hostage to violence. “The mistakes you could blame Islam for can be found in other religions,” said Charlie Hebdo editor Laurent Sourisseau in his remarks announcing they would no longer print Muhammad cartoons. In some general sense this is true, but there is simply no other major world religion that poses the same violent threat to free expression.
And the American media remain as disingenuous as ever. After the Hebdo attack, the New York Times issued the following statement: “Under Times standards, we do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities. After careful consideration, Times editors decided that describing the [Charlie Hebdo] cartoons in question would give readers sufficient information to understand today’s story.”
But in May, the Times blithely ran a story on Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary, “which caused a furor when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in October 1999. . . . The eight-foot-high depiction of a black Virgin Mary, encrusted with a lump of elephant dung and collaged bottoms from pornographic magazines, outraged religious leaders.” The story was illustrated with, yes, a photo of the offensive painting, proving once again that the Times’s policy of not offending religious sensibilities is disingenuous. Rather, they have a policy of not offending the religion whose adherents threaten violent retaliation.
The Times’s standards editor Philip B. Corbett probably should have stayed his pen rather than remove any doubt that the paper has a blatant double standard. Instead he told the Washington Examiner that the Times, incredibly, was justified in publishing a photo of The Holy Virgin Mary because “there’s no indication that the primary intent of the portrait is to offend or blaspheme.” And how, given the subjective nature of art criticism, did Corbett ascertain that the painting was not intended to offend? “There doesn’t seem to be any comparable level of outrage,” he said.
The Times’s explanation of its “standards” is equal parts delusion and denial. Following even Charlie Hebdo’s surrender to violence, the last thing we should accept is rationalizing cowardice in defense of free expression. In a New York Review of Books essay, Timothy Garton Ash observed that Flemming Rose had “strikingly answered an appeal made by the British columnist Nick Cohen in a panel discussion at the Guardian: ‘If you are frightened, at least have the guts to say that. The most effective form of censorship is one that nobody admits exists.’ ”
