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On the front page of the Calendar section in today's LA Times is an article unlike any I have ever seen that paper - or any MSM newspaper - publish before. It is a passionate, brilliantly-written piece by Tim Rutten in his Regarding Media column. Every sentence of it calls on MSM, and all of us, to defend our freedoms, and our way of life, against the murderers who want to destroy them.
Rutten recounts how 19 years ago, "the Iranian revolution's spiritual leader," Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for the assassination of Salmon Rushdie.
Rushdie survived by spending the better part of the next decade in what amounted to an "author's protection program" maintained by the British government. Several of his translators, however, were killed or wounded.
When news of knighthood spread last weekend, the flames of fanaticism rekindled. An Iranian group offered $150,000 to anyone who would murder the novelist. Effigies of the queen and the writer were burned in riots across Pakistan. That country's religious affairs minister initially said that conferring such an honor on Rushdie justified sending suicide bombers to Britain, then - under pressure - he modified his statement to say it would cause suicide bombers to travel there. Pakistan's national assembly unanimously condemned Rushdie's knighthood and said it reflected "contempt" for Islam and Muhammad. Various high-ranking Iranian clerics called for the writers' death and renewed their insistence that Khomeini's fatwa still is in force. Riots spread to India's Muslim communities.
Friday, the Voice of America reported that Pakistani "lawmakers passed a second resolution calling on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologize 'to the Muslim world' " and that, "on Thursday, a hard-line Pakistani cleric awarded terrorist leader Osama bin Laden the religious title and honorific 'saifulla,' or sword of Islam, to protest Britain's decision."
If you're wondering why you haven't been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it's because there haven't been any. And, in that great silence, is a great scandal.
It's breathtaking to read this in an MSM paper. The LA Times headline-writers backed him up, with a large-print headline all the way across the top of the inside page the article jumps to, saying, "Silence is unacceptable in face of violent intolerance and bigotry."
As a blogger, and a Pajamas Media blogger, I'm proud to say that Rutten takes inspiration in part from a Pajamas Media post by Flemming Rose, the editor who courageously published the Danish cartoons of Mohammed:
...one analyst who saw that clearly was Flemming Rose...
...In a column posted on the L.A.-based Pajamas Media website late this week, Rose began by reminding readers of legal scholar Ronald Dworkin's admonition that "the only right you don't have in a democracy is the right not to be offended,"...
Rutten continues:
...what is the societal cost of silence among those who have not simply the moral obligation but also the ability to speak - like American commentators and editorial writers?
What masquerades as tolerance and cultural sensitivity among many U.S. journalists is really a kind of soft bigotry, an unspoken assumption that Muslim societies will naturally repress great writers and murder honest journalists, and that to insist otherwise is somehow intolerant or insensitive.
Lost in the self-righteous haze that masks this expedient sentiment is a critical point once made by the late American philosopher Richard Rorty, who was fond of pointing out that "some ideas, like some people, are just no damn good" and that no amount of faux tolerance or misplaced fellow feeling excuses the rest of us from our obligation to oppose such ideas and such people.
If Western and, particularly American, commentators refuse to speak up when their obligations are so clear, the fanatics will win and the terrible silence they so fervently desire will descend over vast stretches of our world - a silence in which the only permissible sounds are the prayers of the killers and the cries of their victims.
Rutten and the LA Times have shown courage, insight, and leadership. It appears likely that other MSM papers will take note - and that those MSM papers that don't, will be left behind, in this great movement of our time to defend our freedoms and our way of life.
