WyBlog

Sometimes no one cares when books are censored

A British bookseller has decided to indefinitely postpone the release of a controversial book about the Prophet Muhammad. The novel The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones is a fictionalized account of Muhammad's courtship and marriage to a six year old girl. It's release incited Islamist terrorists to firebomb the home of the novel's publisher. In addition threats of violence have forced Ms. Jones to cancel a planned trip to Frankfurt to promote her novel.

Violence, threats, and intimidation by Islamic factions has succeeded in a de facto "ban" on this book. Yet there is no worldwide outrage? Ms. Jones is on course to become the next Salmon Rushdie; forced to live in fear for her life. The people who clamored for Sarah Palin's scalp because she merely inquired about how to remove a book from her local library are strangely silent in the face of this far more insidious attack on free speech. Just as they ignored the murder of Theo Van Gogh our intelligentsia will demur on the threats from Islamic thugs against Ms. Jones, saying there is nothing they can do anyway.

So in effect Sarah Palin is held to a higher standard than the entirety of the worldwide Muslim population. Removal of a single copy of one book from an obscure backwoods library is deemed to be a far greater sin than a coordinated campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at preventing the distribution of thousands of copies of a new book. It's another example of the bizarre multicultural double standard at work. Non-Christian, non-western peoples are given wide lattitude in their actions and beliefs. Their feelings always trump ours; their demands are never too outrageous. And so we acquiesce with merely a whimper.

If Ms. Jones really wants to get her novel published she should convince Sarah Palin to criticize it; my guess is that will put it at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list by nightfall.

Posted at 14:24 by Chris   []   | | Perm Link |