September 2009
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.
Yale 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.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Slate, August 17, 2009
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