Great Minds Think Alike

Last night I went over to Chatterbox Chronicles, and responded to a commenter on the idea that the west shouldn't have published the cartoons of Mohammed.

He had posted the following:

I'm going to disagree with you about posting the pictures. I think the reality of the situation has to be taken into concern.

My response was this:

James, what reality should we face? That a newspapers freedom to publish something is being quashed by the threat of violence against them? As a people in the US we've rejected that same type of reaction from our own intolerant groups like the KKK. While there are many bigoted whites around, you'll find very few who agree with the KKK's methods of dealing with their bigotry. So why should we knuckle under to a group that is really the cultural equivalent to the KKK? You can go ahead and run down the road of appeasement, it hasn't worked. Here is a link to a site that will show you what 27 years of appeasing Islamic Terrorists has gotten us.

Then, I get up this morning and find my response was a channeling of the thoughts of Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz, who have an excellent opinion piece in this mornings Washington Post, taking the American media to task over this issue.

While we may disagree among ourselves about whether and when the public interest justifies the disclosure of classified wartime information, our general agreement and understanding of the First Amendment and a free press is informed by the fact -- not opinion but fact -- that without broad freedom, without
responsibility for the right to know carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists and publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public interest.

A lot of bloggers, including myself, have been very critical of the media in this regard. Bennett and Dershowitz, definitely a set of "strange bedfellows", express very well what the rest of us have been feeling, that the press caved to pressure from radical Islam. There has been a mob veto, to use their phrase, of the coverage of the 12 cartoons.

In fact, that veto went so far as to have an editor at the Daily Illini, a college paper for the University of Illinois, dismissed for printing them. Stop the ACLU is even supporting the ACLU in trying to get him reinstated (and no, Hell didn't freeze over).

What do these folks, from all these divergent backgrounds understand that James over at Chatterbox Chronicles doesn't? Again Bennett and Dershowitz explain it best:

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press -- an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms -- would be among the first to surrender.

Read the rest of their opinion piece if you read nothing else today.
Technorati Tags: Islam, Religion, Denmark, cartoons Yemen, prophet,Press, Washington Post

Other Folks Blogging On This: Lone Pony with American Press Held Hostage By Islamic Terrorists, and Thunder Run with his Web Recon Report for today. Educated Shoprat has an even larger roundup of bloggers who are covering this today.