Last night, on The Kelly File, Mark Steyn ripped into the cowardly actions of Western media for censoring images of the prophet Muhammad out of fear.
The New York Daily News, in particular, was the target of Steyn’s disdain for blurring the images of Muhammad in Charlie Hebdo comics. Steyn did have some positive sentiments for those that did show the comics without censoring.
Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Muhammad – the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006 because they decided to stand by those cartoonists. I’m proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Muhammad cartoons. And it’s because The New York Times didn’t and because Le Monde in Paris didn’t, and The London Times didn’t and all the other great newspapers of the world didn’t. Only Charlie Hebdo and my magizine in Canada and a few others did. But they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed.
I see these candlelight vigils and everyone claiming suddenly to be for freedom of speech. I think one consequence is that a lot of people will retreat even further into self-censorship. The New York Daily News won’t even show – dishonors the dead in Paris by not even showing properly the cartoons. They pixelated Muhammad out of it so it looks like Muhammad has entered the witness protection program, but they left the hooked-nose Jew in and that exactly gets to the double standard here. You can say anything you like about Christianity, you can say anything you like about Judaism. But these guys, everyone understands the message, that if you say anything about Islam, these guys will kill you. We will be retreating a lot more into self-censorship if the pansyfied Western media doesn’t man up and decide to disperse the risk so they can’t kill on small, little French satirical magazine. They’ve gotta kill all of us.
