NYU’s Cartoonish Quarantine

I have recently been espousing the work of the scholar NYU's capitulation to fear and thuggery on their recent censure of the display of The Danish Cartoons is here at the American Thinker. I can't run it all but I'd like to….I think alot of this guy. Hit the link and read it all. Oh and buy the book.

NYU’s Cartoonish Quarantine

This past Wednesday
evening, March 29, 2006, I participated in a panel discussion of the Danish
cartoon jihad where life imitated (Grenier’s) art
as depressing farce through the actions of the
New York University
Administration. The NYU Administration’s toxic combination of moral cowardice
and absurd, offensive “reasoning” forced a Hobson’s choice upon the courageous
NYU Objectivist Club student organizers  of this important forum: If the
cartoons were to be displayed, they could either limit admission to the event to
the “NYU community” and exclude the over 150 off-campus guests who had
registered to attend the event, or (as the students ultimately decided) to keep
the event open to the (pre-registered) public, agree not to show the Danish cartoons. The FIRE (Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education)  website has posted E-mails from NYU
administrator Robert Butler  on March 27 and 28 documenting this ultimatum.

And NYU spokesman John Beckman mimicked the pious wisdom of the Al
Azhar “doctors” of The Marrakesh One-Two with this astonishing pronouncement:

Realistically, one can have
a discussion on smallpox without actually handing out the live virus to the
audience.

As a physician and
epidemiologist having studied both the historical impact of past infectious
plagues, such as small pox, and managed real patients suffering from cruel,
deadly viral illnesses still extant today, it is hard to comprehend the warped
mindset that makes a glib analogy between deliberate exposure to a highly
contagious, lethal virus capable of causing indiscriminate, mass death, and
viewing twelve rather tame cartoons which might offend the sensibilities of some
Muslims.

Sans cartoons, and
amidst intensive (full metal jacket/body scan) security—(Whose “sensibilities”
were offended by that state-of-siege requirement one might ask the NYU
administrators? Were those same administrators  aware that the unhinged, openly
jihadist supporting British Muslim “journalist” Yvonne
Ridley had
personally intervened
to foment Muslim student unrest at NYU?)—the panel discussion did proceed.
Excellent blow by blow accounts of this enlightening evening are available from
bloggers who attended. (Atlas Shrugged has provided the most detailed assessment).

The NYU Objectivist Club
student organizers, in cooperation with the Ayn Rand Institute, produced a highly informative
program representing the eclectic views of attorney
Lukianoff,
President of FIRE, and specialist in First Amendment
Law; journalist and playwright Jonathan
Leaf, who recently resigned as arts editor for the New York Press
in protest over the paper’s decision to withdraw the Danish cartoons from an
issue dedicated to discussing
them ; Peter
Schwartz, editor
and author of The
Foreign Policy of Self-Interest, and me.

Addressing the symbolic
empty jet black easels behind the panel, where a sampling of the cartoons would
have been placed, Mr. Lukianoff noted their tragic absence, ruefully:

Those blank easels were a
testament to campus repression and a climate of fear.

This tragedy—and the larger
failure of mainstream print and other media to display the 12 images—was
compounded by the bitter irony, that as Lukianoff observed, the Danish cartoons

have become perhaps the most important and “newsworthy” cartoons in history.
Jonathan Leaf  emphasized the difficulty of conveying the issues, both literally
and figuratively, without displaying the cartoons. Leaf only became aware
himself of the banality of the cartoons upon reviewing page proofs of the images
for an issue of the New York Press that was never published, leading to
his voluntary resignation. Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute, made the
perspicacious observation that the ultimate goal of those Muslims violently
fulminating over the cartoons was to create an atmosphere of such intimidation
that non-Muslim societies accepted self-censorship, recasting their fear in
principled language as “religious respectfulness” or “tolerance.”

During my own presentation,
and comments, I emphasized how images of Muhammad, both pious and critical, have
been produced almost continuously, for a half millennium by Muslim
and non-Muslim artisans alike. And in an age where jihadism is run amok, why not
ridicule one of its primary sources, i.e., the sacralized violence of  Muhammad
himself, emphasized by none other than Sheik Yusuf Al-Qaradawi? The Sheikh is a
leading authority in the Muslim world today—“spiritual” leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood movement, and head of The European Fatwa Council—lionized (by the
doyen of academic apologists for Islam, John Esposito of Georgetown University)
as a “champion of reformist Islam”. During a June 19, 2001 broadcast of one his
widely viewed Al-Jazeera religious programs, Qaradawi highlighted the unique
characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad when compared to the prophets that
preceded him, in a lecture
entitled, “The Prophet Muhammad as a Jihad Model” :

The prophets that Allah
sent prior to Muhammad were sent for a limited time …and to a specific people. …
Allah established in the life of the Prophet Muhammad general, eternal, and all
inclusive characteristics, and he gave every human being the possibility to
imitate him and take his life as a model…The Christian is incapable of imitating
Jesus regarding war and conciliation since Jesus never fought or made peace.

Allah has…made the
prophet Muhammad into an epitome for religious
warriors [Mujahideen] since he
ordered Muhammed to fight for religion …

Qaradawi further
acknowledged that Muhammad launched armed jihad during his sojourn in Medina. He
also maintained that there is in fact a “jihad which you seek,” i.e., invading
other [countries] in order to spread the word of Islam and to remove obstacles
standing in the way of this Islamization.

Thus I concluded that the
cartoons were also an important statement of long overdue criticism of the
direct nexus between Muhammad’s actions, this “Ecce Homo
Arabicus,” and
jihadism, made triumphally by the most prominent contemporary Muslim clerics
such as Qaradawi.

John Stuart Mill wrote a
letter dated March 18, 1840, extolling the notion of a perfect openness of, 
“…discussion in all its modes – speaking, writing, and printing – in law” being
in government the

…first requisite of good
because the first condition of popular intelligence and mental progress. All
else is secondary. A form of government is good chiefly in proportion to the
security it affords for the possession of this.

The only way we arrive at
truth is by open discussion, with full freedom of expression. Thus the NYU
cartoon panel discussion, as designed originally by the student organizers,
included, appropriately, the display of the actual cartoons in question.
Ultimately, stifling such fora enables coercive powers—governments or
religious orders for example—to impose any order they wish. Ayn Rand in the
climactic speech of her epic novel, Atlas Shrugged, (cited in this
brilliant essay by the
intrepid philosopher and Muslim “apostate” Irfan Khawaja) wrote:

“The moral is the chosen,
not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and
reason accepts no commandments.”  (Atlas
Shrugged, p.
944).

Somehow the quintessence of
these conceptions of Mill and Ayn Rand—don’t ask me to explain precisely—it’s
more of a gestalt—are reiterated in another idiom by my favorite
philosopher, Marx—i.e., Groucho Marx, who stated, “Outside of a dog, a book is
man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

The pusillanimous
administrators of NYU, whose cowardice was concealed poorly by hollow (and
bizarre) utterances regarding concerns not to “offend,” need to quarantine their
personal fears and stop infecting the broader community with their own virulent
strain of craven dhimmitude.   

Andrew G. Bostom is
the author of The Legacy of
Jihad.

Amen, Dr. Bostom, amen.

Need to feed your brain (me? my brain is always hungry) there's more to chew on. Egyptian Sandmonkey tells me that  the Egyptian cartoonists decided to launch a counter-attack by
drawing their own cartoons, and he has them all up right here.

All the toons are basically self explanatory, the bottom right toon is showing Islam as a flower being watered by an angel, and when the evil
people (note the "Jewish nose"; Egyptians in cartoons and books always protray Jews with crooked noses) tried to step on the hose, it sprayed blood all over
them. There is a Koranic verse on the bottom that loosely translates to "They
tried to plot against Islam so we made them lose/fail".

There's more , much more go here.

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