13 October 2015

The "Islamic Inquisition" and the Blasphemy Police

.... Last week, on the anniversary of the publication of the first Mohammed cartoons, Jyllands-Posten republished the original spread. The page and texts were laid out as they had been on that famous day ten year earlier.

But one thing was missing: the cartoons. Where the original images had been -- even the ones that did not depict Mohammed -- there were only blank spaces. What had been possible in 2005 was no longer possible in 2015.

One can hardly blame the publishers. After ten years of paying for security, and staff having to work in perhaps the most threatened newspaper office on earth, the editors of Jyllands-Posten signalled that they had had enough of the threats and enough of the danger. They censored themselves.

It took only ten years for most people across the West to learn about Islamic blasphemy -- and in the end to abide by it. Today there might be thousands of people willing to publish cartoons of Mohammed on their Twitter accounts, but most of them hide behind aliases and complain about the cowardice of others. [Gatestone Institute] Read more