Never mind Mohammed, Oxford University Press has instructed its children's authors not to mention pigs, sausages or any other pork-related words - and then compounded its cravenness by lying about who it's caving in to, claiming that it wants to "avoid offending Jews and Muslims", as if any British Jew has ever complained about Piglet or a piggy bank.
Where's the Lead in the Pencil? :: SteynOnline
by Mark Steyn Steyn on the World January 14, 2015
The cover of this week's Charlie Hebdo (right) shows Mohammed shedding a tear and holding up a "Je suis Charlie" sign under the headline "Tout est pardonné" - all is forgiven. The illustration is unclear: Is Mohammed forgiving the secular leftie blasphemers? Or are the secular lefties forgiving Mohammed and his murderous believers? The Commentator devotes an editorial to the subject, and finds it "a strange cover" symbolic of "western confusion". On the other hand, Paul Berman in The Tablet thinks "uncertainty lends majesty". On the other other hand, over at Ace of Spades, they thinkCharlie's staff are mocking hashtag solidarity and "vomiting on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends".
When skilled persons who have never shied away from clarity produce a work whose meaning is unclear, then it is reasonable to assume the unclearness is itself the meaning. The surviving staff atCharlie Hebdo have undergone a week of surreal hellishness, in which their senior colleagues have been murdered for publishing images of Mohammed, and the world is professing its solidarity and egging them on to prove that nothing has changed. In other words, they're expected to produce new images of Mohammed, which may well get them murdered, too.
Meanwhile, no one else is even re-publishing the old Mohammed images, even as your basic Exhibit A in a news story - ie, this is whythese guys were killed.
On the night of the attack, I was on Fox News with Megyn Kelly andsaid:
Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Muhammad — the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006 because they decided to stand by those Danish cartoonists. I'm proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Muhammad cartoons. And it's because The New York Times didn't and because Le Monde in Paris didn't, and the London Times didn't and all the other great newspapers of the world didn't - only Charlie Hebdo and my magazine in Canada and a few others did. But they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed...-go to link-
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