Alternatives until none exist
Out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy.
Of course, I had to check what our free local leftist rag "Eye Weekly" has to say about the cartoon controversy. The editorial states that
It may be difficult to understand what all the fuss is about given that we live in a society where Jesus has a regular role on South Park, but we don't feel it's a newspaper's job to mock the religious beliefs of its readership in such a dismissive fashion.
Right. I shall
leave it to anybody who is even remotely familiar with this
ultra-leftist paper for whom even NDP is too much to the right to
decide for themselves whether this paper has usually avoided "mocking
the religious beliefs of its readership".
I don't know how
common this is in North America, but at least every single issue of Eye
Weekly contains several pages of ads for escort services and phone sex,
in quite a graphic glory. I guess that for all their trendy leftism,
the feminist concerns in the main content have to step aside when it
comes to actually making money. Speaking of which, I wonder if these
alternative weeklies have ever written about the idea that women should
not dress provocatively and go out alone at night since by doing so
they make themselves more vulnerable to rape, since this warning is
amusingly analogous to the cartoon controversy in so many levels at
once. Some provocations are more serious than others, it seems.
Contrast this to The Stranger in Seattle, whose article "All The Rage" takes the side of freedom:
On the contrary, what’s happening here is that a gang of bullies—led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely labeled “apes and pigs” in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished by death—is trying to compel a tiny democracy to live by its own theocratic rules. To succumb to pressure from this gang would simply be to invite further pressure, and lead to further concessions—not just by Denmark but by all of democratic Europe. And when they’ve tamed Europe, they’ll come after America.
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