Fetching updates...Yale Preemptively Censors Itself Due to Fear of Violent Retribution
August 25, 2009
Jytte Klausen’s forthcoming book, The Cartoons That Shook the World details the back-story of the 2005 Muslim riots over cartoons
published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that left roughly 200 people dead.
Yale University Press, however, has decided to remove the 12 depictions of Mohammed from the book, as a variety of their consultants have "confirmed that the republication of the cartoons…(runs) a serious risk of instigating violence." As YUP’s director John Donatich stated, he always publishes press on topics of controversy, but "when it (comes) between that and blood on my hands, there was no question" he would balk.
As Christopher Hitchens so aptly wrote in his article for Slate, "(n)ow 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…what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility."