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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Government and journalists cower at threats to cartoonist

  • Did the FBI suggest that people threatened by the KKK go into hiding? 
  • Did journalists ignore the threat? 
  • Are the threats of radical Islam more real?
These are questions worth asking.  The answers are self-evident.  The question is: why?

Last week, the Seattle Weekly announced that Molly Norris, its editorial cartoonist, had "gone ghost." Put another way, she went into hiding. The FBI told her she had to because otherwise it couldn't protect her against death threats from Muslims she'd angered. Earlier this year, Norris started "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" to protest radical Muslims' violently stifling freedom of speech and conscience. Incredibly, her plight has drawn precious little media attention, even though it is infinitely more newsworthy than, say, a fundamentalist preacher in Florida threatening to burn Qurans.


When The Examiner asked the American Society of News Editors for a statement on the issue, none was forthcoming. This despite the fact that the first sentence of ASNE's Web site describes its mission as supporting "the First Amendment at home and free speech around the world." We got a similar response from the Society of Professional Journalists, despite its dedication "to the perpetuation of the free press as the cornerstone of our nation and liberty."

Freedom of speech and press are in deep trouble when the American government thinks the best it can do to protect a journalist from death threats is to counsel her to go into hiding, and when the elite voices of American journalism can't be bothered to say anything in her defense.

Read more at the Washington Examiner and then call Nick Kristoff who apologized to the followers of Islam for the American people.  Trying to save his neck?

Glenn Reynolds has the answer:
Why Won’t Our Brave Media And Government Officials Speak Up For Molly Norris? Because they’re cowards.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well said, this story doesn't get much cover by anyone, and I did not know about the journalist(isn't that a dead word?) organizations refusal to comment on one of their own.

How many times does the religion of peace and tolerance need to be shown otherwise before the narrative actually changes? My guess never, because like you said -- cowards.