The Mohammad Cartoons: High Noon for Free Speech

Our Winter 2006 issue earned considerable attention as the first magazine in America to reprint, on its front cover, one of those now-notorious Danish cartoons of Muhammad. In the same issue, I editorially lambasted the rest of the Western media for surrendering to militant Islamists, and for refusing to publish these cartoons as a matter of principle.

But the contagion of craven capitulation has spread faster than the bird flu.

Shortly afterwards, the Comedy Central cable TV network blacked out a cartoon image of Mohammad on an episode of its popular animated show, “South Park”—an episode which, ironically, satirized the media for its cowardice on that very issue!

Then the Borders Books retail chain publicly announced that it was banishing from its shelves an issue of a magazine, Free Inquiry (yet more irony), which had reprinted the Muhammad cartoons inside.

Borders cited no specific threat against itself; its goal was to preemptively ward off hypothetical attacks from potentially angry Muslims. In a form letter to protesting customers, the company said, “we decided not to stock this issue in our stores because we place a priority on the safety and security of our customers and our employees. We believe that carrying this issue presented a challenge to that priority.”

One priority not in evidence, however—neither for Borders nor for the rest of the Western media—is willingness to stand against threats to the First Amendment, upon which their very businesses depend. Not even against hypothetical threats.

For as any reasonable person could have predicted, no bookstore that did carry Free Inquiry was subjected to an Islamist attack; neither was Free Inquiry itself; neither were the writers and producers of “South Park”; and neither were we at The New Individualist. In short, this was surrender not to bullies, but to bogeymen.

And the sorry spectacle reminded me of a movie.

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In the wake of the Mohammad cartoons, craven capitulation has spread faster than the bird flu.

High Noon, director Fred Zinnemann’s classic Western, told the story of a retiring town marshal, Will Kane, who learns on his wedding day that four outlaw enemies are coming to his town of Hadleyville, bent on revenge. Rather than escape with his new bride, Kane stays to face the threat. Before the noon showdown, he tries to enlist a posse from among neighbors, friends, and churchmen. But one by one, all whom he approaches for support—people for whom he had risked his life for years—find excuses to turn him down. Their rationalizations run the gamut: expediency, indecisiveness, physical inability, jealousy, pacifism. But the most common motive is sheer cowardice.

Afraid himself, yet bound by honor, the solitary Kane stands up to and somehow defeats the gang. Then, as the Hadleyville townspeople emerge from their hiding places, the disgusted lawman tosses his tin star into the dirt, turns on his heel, and rides out of town with his bride.

Gary Cooper won the Oscar for his stoic portrait of the betrayed and beleaguered marshal. The 1952 film has become a timeless allegory of the lone hero during corrupt times.

Not surprising, then, that I thought of High Noon while reading the rationalizations of today’s capitulators. Like good citizens of Hadleyville, they offer every imaginable excuse for failing to stand up to the bullies of our own time:

Look, I run a private business, and I have the right to carry or not carry whatever I want on my shelves...After all, it’s only one little magazine...Hey, it’s not my job to fight terrorists: what do I pay taxes for?...I don’t want to offend my customers/employees...I want to protect my customers/employees...Well, how would you like to have your religion insulted?...Don’t talk to me about abstract principles—this is just a business decision....

On and on goes their excuse making. But everyone knows what it’s really about. Whether it’s fear of losing business, fear of being attacked, fear of offending the occasional customer or employee, fear of lawsuits—the operative word is always fear. Fear has become the master of Western journalists, editors, publishers, broadcasters, and now, even bookstores.

Led by these traitors to the First Amendment, America is becoming a real-life Hadleyville, and many are coming to resemble the cringing residents of that corrupt fictional crossroads: prostrate in spineless supplication before the town bullies, projecting shameful resentment against the Will Kanes, whose bravery shows them up for the cowards that they are.

If the West ever surrenders to the jihadists, somewhere in the dust and rubble of our shattered skyscrapers will lie a defending soldier’s Silver Star. And like Will Kane’s tin star, it will remain there in eternal reproach against those who forced him to face evil alone.

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Free Speech and Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks
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