Muhammad: The "Banned" Images Blog Free Speech at Risk

Duke University's Voltaire Press has agreed to publish a book examining the Danish cartoon controversy. Unlike Yale University, Duke has not demanded its press censor the resulting book.

The Yale administration had interceded with the press to force the censorship. To support its censorship, Yale consulted with such luminaries as former Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and columnist Fareed Zakaria, both of whom supported adherence to perceived Islamist demands. Yale president Richard Levin has sent a letter that said the Yale Corporation, the university's governing body, supported the decision to censor. PBS's Margaret Warner serves on the Corporation, and has not spoken up to defend free speech and academic inquiry. Levin's letter implies Warner endorses Yale's censorship.

Yale University's lack of committment to serious academic study is a pity. It indicates a university in decline. It is as disappointing to see the number of luminaries, statesmen. and journalists serving Yale who refuse to realize what a slippery slope their acquiescence to censorship is.

The controversy surrounding images of the prophet Muhammad by Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard continued this week when Duke University professor Gary Hull published a book reprinting the images.
Yale University Press made a decision this August not to include the images, which incited riots when they were first printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005, in the book The Cartoons That Shook the World by Brandeis professor Jytte Klausen, which was published in October. Hull’s new book, Muhammad: The “Banned” Images, contains the visual content excluded from Klausen’s book, and a statement emphasizing the importance of free speech and deploring Yale’s decision to censor the images.

For much of our 30-minute interview, Gary Hull, a Duke lecturing fellow in sociology, and I discussed academic freedom, the challenges of self-publishing and the Enlightenment….

A Duke professor is making a bold statement about free speech with a new book likely to touch a nerve among many Muslims. Gary Hull, director of the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace and a lecturing fellow in sociology, released a book Monday … “My primary motive here is to defend reason, Western civilization and individual rights,” Hull said. “It’s just a very public statement in defense of free speech.” …

More fodder for the Ideology of the Eternally Outraged (IEO) to seethe over! In order for the dhimmi appeasers at Yale University and the followers of the IEO to clearly get the message that, religion and religious sensibilities do not trump secular law and free speech rights, a new picture book of Mohamed is now being made available to defy the censors and Mohammedans who wish to impose their world view on the West.

The Voltaire Press is issuing a book titledMuhammad: The “Banned” Images.
Last August, as you may recall, the weenie prestigious Yale University Press pulled the prayer rug out from under author Jytte Klausen, a Brandeis professor who’d written her own book on the subject of the Motoons. Dr. Klausen’s book is called The Cartoons That Shook the World. The Craven Press was okay with the book, but it decided to nix the pix.

(Reprinted 11/10/2009 on the International Free Press Society blog)

The provocatively titled Muhammad: The "Banned" Images adds another chapter to the saga of the Danish cartoons, which were back in the news recently after the FBI arrested David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana for plotting to kill Flemming Rose. Rose is the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that sponsored and first published the controversial cartoons back in 2005. …

Just in case you’d forgotten about those Muhammad cartoons that the Yale University Press decided to omit from its book about the Muhammad cartoons, here they come again. Muhammad: The “Banned” Images stands as a direct response to Jytte Klausen’s image-purged The Cartoons That Shook the World.