Monday, February 20, 2006

Double Standard: Cartoons and Killing

Is there a view now that America is evil and that it's all right to condemn this country, its leaders and soldiers, but not offend those who have attacked it, who have killed 3,000 people here?
Muslim radicals flew commercial airlines into buildings here, beheaded innocent businessmen and a reporter in Iraq and put the tapes of the beheadings on the Internet, blew up Iraqi children at school, murdered teachers, beheaded schoolgirls attending a Christian school in Indonesia, killed American sailors in Yemen, slaughtered hundreds of children in Russia, fired rockets at schools in Israel, killed scores of commuters in Spain and England, murdered vacationers in Bali, attacked a missionary school in India and took hundreds hostage inside a theater in Moscow, with deadly results. Where was the Muslim outrage when all of this was going on? Did Muslims take to the streets to protest the carnage? No. But Danish newspapers print cartoons depicting Muhammad as a bomb-turbaned man and people are killed, embassies are burned. And what happens? Newspapers here (including the Sun-Times) don't print the cartoons. They tell us what's in the cartoons, but they don't print them.
Two editors of the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois who were brave enough to print the cartoons, alongside an article that explained the controversy, were suspended for their action. I don't understand this curious political correctness.
We've been treated to publications of pictures of beheadings and of American contractors burnt, dismembered and hanging from a bridge, yet newspapers can't reprint cartoons? Are we now so sensitive to our attackers that we are cowered by them? If so, we've become a nation of self-hate. More important, we have forgotten history
(from Chicago Sun-Times).

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