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February 13, 2008
Barbarian follow up
It's been two years since our posts on the Danish Muhammad cartoon flap. It may be two years but barbarians are like elephants, they never forget:
The arrests were made in pre-dawn raids in Aarhus, western Denmark, "to prevent a terror-related murder," the police intelligence agency said. It did not say how many people were arrested nor did it mention which cartoonist was targeted.However, according to Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the drawings on Sept. 30, 2005, the suspects were planning to kill its cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.
"There were very concrete murder plans against Kurt Westergaard," said Carsten Juste, the paper's editor-in-chief.
The 73 year old cartoonist and his wife are living under police protection. It is very likely that this will have to continue for a very long time.
The newspaper in Denmark has to it credit has reprinted the cartoons in solidarity with the cartoonist today. Several major blogs have also done so.
Two years ago I pointed to the reasons why we didn't publish the cartoons on our posts concerning the matter.
In my opinion those circumstances have changed. It is impossible to tell the story without showing the cartoon in question. And it is a story that needs to be told. The great strength and advantage of the internet is the free sharing of information. We have written about it over and over again (even before we had a category for it). It's time to put our pixels where our mouths fingers are.
The day when images like this are censored and those who make then slain will be a dark day for the internet. But if you might recall a lot of this trouble was completely contrived.
Posted by Peter at February 13, 2008 10:50 AM