The New York Times ran a lead editorial Thursday morning in support of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris where ten employees and two policemen were massacred, evidently by radical Muslims upset with its satirical portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad, images of whom are forbidden under Islam.
The paper, adhering to politically correct form, danced around blaming Islamists for the massacre:
The brutal terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday has badly shaken France. But the French have reacted with a fierce determination to defend their freedoms. President François Hollande, speaking from outside the magazine’s office a couple of hours after the murder of 12 people, was crystal clear: This was an assault, he said, on “the expression of freedom” that is the “spirit of the republic.”
Two heavily armed attackers, who apparently knew the magazine’s staff would be gathered around a table late on Wednesday morning for a weekly editorial meeting, forced themselves into Charlie Hebdo’s office and shot 10 people dead, including the top editor and prominent cartoonists. Two policemen were also killed. At least 11 other victims were wounded. The gunmen then fled with a third accomplice in a waiting car. One of the three later surrendered to police, but the other two, who are brothers, remain at large.
And this paragraph was glaringly hypocritical, given the paper's pathetic failing to defend the free expression of fellow journalists attacked by Muslim radicals in Denmark and elsewhere:
There are some who will say that Charlie Hebdo tempted the ire of Islamists one too many times, as if coldblooded murder is the price to pay for putting out a magazine. The massacre was motivated by hate. It is absurd to suggest that the way to avoid terrorist attacks is to let the terrorists dictate standards in a democracy.
That's particularly rich coming from the New York Times, given the paper's controversial tweet yesterday suggesting the exact same thing ("The weekly #CharlieHebdo has long tested limits with its satire..."), as well as the paper's previous hostile treatment of cartoonists for European publications who braved threats and murder to draw cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.
In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in unflattering terms. Violent protests broke out among Muslims worldwide. In a February 5, 2006 story, reporter Craig Smith found the cartoons more inflammatory than Muslims burning embassies in protest. Even the headline to his story suggested that the Danish newspapers' exercise of free speech was somehow irresponsible, likening it to pouring fuel on a flame: "Adding Newsprint to the Fire."
Smith added his own fuel to the fire, comparing the cartoons to anti-black and anti-Semitic cartoons:
But this did not take place in a political vacuum. Hostile feelings have been growing between Denmark's immigrants and a government supported by the right-wing Danish People's Party, which has pushed anti-immigrant policies. And stereotyping in cartoons has a notorious history in Europe, where anti-Semitic caricatures fed the Holocaust, just as they feed anti-Israeli propaganda in the Middle East today.
In the current climate, some experts on mass communications suggest, the exercise was no more benign than commissioning caricatures of African-Americans would have been during the 1960's civil rights struggle. 'You have to ask what was the intent of these cartoons, bearing in mind the recent history of tension in Denmark with the Muslim community,' said David Welch, head of the Center for the Study of Propaganda and War at the University of Kent in Britain. Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School, put it this way: 'He knew what he was doing.'
While the Times has refused to run any of the "offensive" Muhammad cartoons over the years, sniffing in 2006 that it was "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols....", it proudly ran pictures the very next day from an exhibition featuring a "portrait" of a dung-clotted Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili.
