"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Thursday, May 12, 2022

European publishers self-censor and capitulate on Islam

Giulio Meotti's written about the terrible state of modern censorship on the issues of Islam, much worse than it was when Salman Rushdie wrote the Satanic Verses:
When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1989, Viking Penguin, the British and American publisher of the novel, was subjected to daily threats from Islamists. As Daniel Pipes wrote, the London office resembled "a battlefield", with police on guard, metal detectors and an escort for visitors. At the New York office, trained dogs sniffed mail packages and the offices were called a "sensitive place."

Many bookstores were attacked and many others refused to sell the book. Viking spent three million dollars on security measures, but it never faltered. Today, Western publishers all self-censor. And London capitulates to intimidation.

A popular children's book from the Biff, Chip, and Kipper series has just been retired following complaints that its portrayal of the Muslim people was racist, the Telegraph said. Oxford University Press is the publisher of The Blue Eye, in which young characters are transported to a foreign land with the help of a magic key. Children gather at a busy street market, which appears to be somewhere in the Middle East, where men are wearing white turbans and a woman is dressed in a niqab. The publisher said: "The book has been completely withdrawn from print and we have destroyed our remaining stock of the book, although a small number of copies may still remain in the supply chain. Some older titles may still be available in bookstores or as second-hand copies."

"And it doesn't matter, as the Times recalls, that" millions of children were trained in England on the books of Biff, Chip and Kipper". Turbans and niqabs are not appropriate, says the BBC.

Islam is treated in white gloves in so-called multiculturalism.

[...] Today the ancient fear of Islam has been welded to the new Woke hegemony. “Wokism has just begun” Pascal Bruckner writes this week in Le Figaro. “It is introduced as a product imported from the United States, especially on campuses (synthesis of asylums and re-education camps) with all the seduction of novelty and chic. It is a passing fad that is turning into a leftist ideology and is destined to consolidate itself for many years in the media, at school and in business. It will disappear only when public opinion gets tired of the nonsense or professed abominations of gender, identity, race. It will take a whole generation”.
Sadly, it makes sense that wokism's come from leftist USA institutions, and now, it's resulted over the years in a tragedy where only so many challenging issues are shunned by publishers and even film studios and such because it doesn't meet their modern standards of political correctness. It's one of the leading reasons why modern literature and entertainment is in such a dire, bankrupt state. That aside, any publisher who doesn't have the courage any more than the resources to deal with all these issues has no business working in book publishing. The query now is, will conservatives be willing to show the courage to work on what leftist outfits aren't?

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