You won’t have expected that miserable Yale University Press decision to go down well with Christopher Hitchens. It hasn’t:
According to Yale logic, violence could result from the showing of the images – and not only that, but it would be those who displayed the images who were directly responsible for that violence.
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It was bad enough during the original controversy, when most of the news media – and in the age of “the image” at that – refused to show the cartoons out of simple fear. But now the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.
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The First Amendment to [the] Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.