From the editors at the New York Press:
The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper’s publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.
Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:
New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editorJonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.
We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we’d criticized others for not running, cartoons that however absurdly have inspired arson, kidnapping and murder and forced cartoonists in at least two continents to go into hiding. Editors have already been forced to leave papers in Jordan and France for having run these cartoons. We have no illusions about the power of the Press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them.
Meanwhile, CNN is refusing to display them out of respect for Islam. Of course, as John Miller of NRO’s Corner has pointed out, it has no similar regard for Christianity or Judaism.
Perhaps Christians should take notes from this unsurprising, but signal lesson in secular pusillanimity and shoot a few artists, editors and movie producers. No doubt we’d be up to our necks in television shows about King David and movies about the Apostle Paul within months.
Only three newspapers are willing to cover a story accurately. I guess they weren’t all that willing to sacrifice their lives for their right to speak freely; what are the chances that they actually stand by that Voltairean flag they’re always waving?