By Andrew L. Jaffee, netwmd.com

All for fear of offending Muslims, we have “a quiet wave of self-censorship and cultural cowardice sweeping Western art circles:” A novel (The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones) is pulled before it even got published; the “BBC has dropped a big-budget docu-drama, The London Bombers;” “the BBC hospital soap Casualty chang[ed] Muslim terrorists into animal rights activists;” and, the “Royal Court Theatre cancel[ed] an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.” To this sorry list, I would add all the U.S. and Canadian newspapers who refused to publish the Danish Mohammad cartoons, because the editors were cowering under their desks. I turn readers’ attention to an op-ed by Mick Hume for the Sunday Times

Just the impassioned prose of the author — the sheer quality — should be enough to scream “WAKE-UP CALL” to the West:

… The threat to freedom here does not come from a few Islamic radicals, but from the invertebrate liberals of the cultural establishment who have so lost faith in themselves that they will surrender their freedoms before anybody starts a fight. The mere suggestion of causing offence to some mob of imagined stereotypes is enough to have them scurrying for a bomb shelter, their creative imaginations blowing up small protests into the threat of a big culture war. Of course, such pre-emptive grovelling only encourages any zealot with a blog to demand even more censorship.

Who needs book burners if “offensive” books are not allowed to be published in the first place? Why bother to protest against provocative plays if the theatres will turn the lights off for you beforehand? There is no need even for a polite exchange on Points of View if the controversial programmes never get made.

The quality or lack of it in the self-censored works is not the issue here. That associate professor from Texas condemned the novel about Muhammad’s wife as “soft porn”. But so what if it was? Free expression should mean freedom for what others see as filth, too. If there are artists childishly causing offence for its own sake, feel free to ignore them, but not to gag them.

Pre-emptive grovelling, encouraged from the top down by our illiberal authorities, is bad for the arts and for society. The arts can only flourish in a climate of cultural anarchy rather than compulsion and conformity. The attempt to limit what can be said must have a chilling effect, encouraging other writers and artists to pull in their horns.

Such self-censorship is also dangerous for those who don’t much care about high culture. There is indeed a lesson from the Satanic Verses controversy, but not the one often cited. The dominant response to that clash of cultures was to try to bury it beneath worthy multicultural claptrap about celebrating difference. After more than 15 years of such attempts to suppress honest debate, the tensions festering beneath the surface exploded on the London transport system. As one female Muslim writer critical of the decision not to publish The Jewel of Medina says: “The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.” …

It’s quite common in the Islamic world, or at least in the mainstream Islamic media and vocal opinion, to forget that the Prophet Mohammad urged Muslims to live peacefully with the “people of the book” or the Christians and Jews whose faiths are the roots of Islamic belief. Haaretz reports that Hamas TV, that cheerful channel, has a new video out purporting that “Satanic Jews” were the masterminds of the Holocaust. Apparently David Ben Gurion was the ringleader.

The accompanying commentary claims that Ben Gurion said “the disabled and handicapped are a heavy burden on the state.” To rid them of that scourge, the video claims, Ben Gurion and “the Satanic Jews thought up an evil plot to be rid of the burden of disable and handicapped in twisted criminal ways.”

This disregards the whole Nazi element, of course. I imagine that Hamas believes Mein Kompf was written by Ben Gurion as well. Indeed, Holocaust denial has reached new heights in the Arab world. And it’s not limited to the “fringe” or to terrorist organizations like Hamas. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister, who has called the Israeli actions in Gaza a Holocaust, wrote a rather laughable denial of the Nazi Holocaust before he was named Prime Minister–and called a “moderate” by many Americans and world leaders. A moderate? The sad thing is, he really is a moderate compared to Hamas. The Hamas program goes on to say:

The Holocaust “was a joke, and part of the perfect show that Ben Gurion put on,” said Amin Dabur, head of the Palestinian Center for Strategic Research organization, in the video.

These are the people we’re supposed to be dealing with to achieve peace? Jimmy Carter thought he could actually convince them that peace was in their best interests when it seems obvious to me that peace is the last thing Hamas desires. They want blood and treasure, and the only thing that allows them to get the power they need is a perpetual war against Israel.

The only way to achieve peace is to dismantle the terrorist operations in Gaza and the West Bank and deal with men who may actually want peace–men like the racist Mahmoud Abbas, as despicable as he may be.