The Media is a Cowardly Bully.

Tony Blankley ppoints out a truth about the MSM. Just as you felt you could not dispise this group of morons any more, they are exposed as the bully who is really a coward.

In Czechoslovakia, under communism, it was common to see signs that read "Workers of the world, unite" in the windows of fruit and vegetable stores. Vaclav Havel, in his book "Living In Truth," discerned the significance of those signs.

As elaborated by Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School, Mr. Havel believed the shopkeeper does not believe the sign. He puts it up because it was "delivered from the headquarters along with the onions." The grocer thinks nothing is at stake because he understands that no one really believes the slogan. The real message, according to Havel is "I'm behaving myself … I am obedient, and therefore I have the right to be left in peace."

But Mr. Havel shrewdly points out that even a modest shopkeeper would be ashamed to put up a sign that literally read "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient." He is, after all, a human being with some sense of dignity. Havel concludes that the display of the sign "workers of the world, unite" allows the green grocer "to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power." (As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Christian theologian hanged by the Nazis for conspiring to try to kill Hitler observed: The failure of the people to speak small truths leads to the victory of the big lie.)

I would argue that this Czechoslovakian parable of the self-deceiving green grocer goes a long way to explaining the decision of most American news outlets not to re-publish the Danish cartoons currently stirring up so much of Islam.

As of yesterday afternoon, the following is, I believe, a complete list of major U.S. daily newspapers that have republished any of those cartoons: The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

More revealing than the refusal of the mainstream American media to repost the Mohammed cartoons is the disappearance of more dangerous material previously available. Newsweek's "Challenging the Koran" story of July 28, 2003, has vanished from the magazine's website. The government of Pakistan had banned that issue, which among other things reported a German philologist's contention that the Koran was written in Syriac rather than classical Arabic, translating the "virgins" of Paradise as "raisins". As I observed before, the topic of Koranic criticism has disappeared from the mainstream media. Since the suppression of the Newsweek story the Western media have steered clear of the subject.