Yale SurrendersWhy did Yale University Press remove images of Mohammed from a book about the Danish cartoons?
Posted Monday, Aug. 17, 2009, at 5:04 PM ET
The capitulation of Yale University Press to threats that hadn't even been made yet is the latest and perhaps the worst episode in the steady surrender to religious extremism—particularly Muslim religious extremism—that is spreading across our culture. A book called The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Danish-born Jytte Klausen, who is a professor of politics at Brandeis University, tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of "protest" and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. (The competition was itself a response to the sudden refusal of a Danish publisher to release a book for children about the life of Mohammed, lest it, too, give offense.) By the time the hysteria had been called off by those who incited it, perhaps as many as 200 people around the world had been pointlessly killed.
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StumbleUponYale University Press announced last week that it would go ahead with the publication of the book, but it would remove from it the 12 caricatures that originated the controversy. Not content with this, it is also removing other historic illustrations of the likeness of the Prophet, including one by Gustave Doré of the passage in Dante's Inferno that shows Mohammed being disemboweled in hell. (These same Dantean stanzas have also been depicted by William Blake, Sandro Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, and Auguste Rodin, so there's a lot of artistic censorship in our future if this sort of thing is allowed to set a precedent.)
Now, the original intention of limiting the representation of Mohammed by Muslims (and Islamic fatwas, before we forget, have no force whatever when applied to people outside the faith) was the rather admirable one of preventing idolatry. It was feared that people might start to worship the man and not the god of whom he was believed to be the messenger. This is why it is crass to refer to Muslims as Mohammedans. Nonetheless, Islamic art contains many examples—especially in Iran—of paintings of the Prophet, and even though the Dante example is really quite an upsetting one, exemplifying a sort of Christian sadism and sectarianism, there has never been any Muslim protest about its pictorial representation in Western art.
If that ever changes, which one can easily imagine it doing, then Yale has already made the argument that gallery directors may use to justify taking down the pictures and locking them away. According to Yale logic, violence could result from the showing of the images—and not only that, but it would be those who displayed the images who were directly responsible for that violence.
Let me illustrate: The Aug. 13 New York Times carried a report of the university press' surrender, which quoted its director, John Donatich, as saying that in general he has "never blinked" in the face of controversy, but "when it came between that and blood on my hands, there was no question."
Donatich is a friend of mine and was once my publisher, so I wrote to him and asked how, if someone blew up a bookshop for carrying professor Klausen's book, the blood would be on the publisher's hands rather than those of the bomber. His reply took the form of the official statement from the press's public affairs department. This informed me that Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that "[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence."
So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.
It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media—and in the age of "the image" at that—refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.
Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who's to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.
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Yale was never threatened. They caved in to the speculation that there might be a problem.
Another option would have served just as well - don't publish the book at all. That would have been the honest, but cowardly, position.
Here, Y.U.P. has taken the dishonest, cowardly position. It purports to bravely publish a book to examine the truth about these cartoons, and discuss the issue critically. Yet, it denies its readers and students the right to see what the book is talking about.
Yale University Press must now, to be fair, not publish anything offensive to any religion, unless it will go on record as caving in only to the violent ones. If it's the latter, then we will have Christians forced to put up with "piss Christs" and other blasphemous images, while any cult that riots over an insult gets to make publishing decisions for the Y.U.P.
Y.U.P. is free to publish what they want, of course. But, the rest of us are free to criticize their decision. I find their decision cowardly and totally incompatible with an educational institution, and contrary to Yale's own policies: Yale states that freedom of expression is central to its "central purpose." Yale's policy states, in part, "We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox. Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts." The policy further provides that "every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression" and that "[e]very official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed."
Failing to publish the cartoons is a gross violation of Yale's central purpose. It is cowardly.. It says, we will defend the right of people to be disturbing and unorthodox, as long as "certain people" aren't offended. In that case, we'll protect "certain people" and not other people.
Yale should be ashamed of itself.
-- prospero811
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Remember Andres Serrano? He was the artist who took a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a glass of his own urine. He gave it the title, "Piss Christ." Because the National Endowment for the Arts funded Serrano, Congress spent weeks filling their own glasses and submerging common sense in the contents. Most of the comments revolved around the idea, "I like artistic freedom, but God is off limits."
Why do the religious faithful feel the need to leap to the defense of their deities? Before we sneer at the Muslims, let's keep in mind we do exactly the same thing when the slightest provocation comes along. Anyway, a big razzberry to Yale Press for capitulating.
-- Arlington
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