 |
|
Nov. 6, 2009
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How
to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Nov. 5, 2009
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking
Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker
With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater?
With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change
With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Oct. 29, 2009
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our
Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
JWisdom.com Why what we wear
impacts who we are
With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love
With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks
With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really?
By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A
Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious
By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things
By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices
By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 15, 2009
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
August 12, 2008
/ 11 Menachem-Av 5768 5768
Free speech jilted by Muhammad romance novel ‘warpath’
By
Diana West
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Reading about the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we are reminded of his epic force of will — despite the threat to life and limb posed by the Soviet police state — to bear witness, to document, to record everything he could about totalitarianism in the USSR.
Then, reading about Random House Publishing Group, which called off the publication of a romance novel about Muhammad "for fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims," we should be reminded of something else: How apt was Solzhenitsyn's much-maligned critique of the West, which he excoriated for, among other things, a decline in "civil courage" that was "particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elites."
In the week after Solzhenitsyn's death, accounts of his determination and toil filled the news. When he had a typewriter, he typed single-spaced on both sides of a sheet; when he had pen and paper, he wrote in miniscule print. When he had neither — as at a remote penal colony in Kazahkstan — he devised a memorization technique involving a rosary made of bread in which each "bead" came to represent a passage of work that he committed to memory. He would later write that he memorized 12,000 lines this way.
By 1973, microfilms of The Gulag Archipelago, the writer's massive history of the Soviet prison camps, had been smuggled out of the USSR to publishers in New York and Paris. Solzhenitsyn asked them to delay publication, however, hoping to see the work come out first in the Soviet Union. But then he changed his mind.
Why? Solzhenitsyn had learned that the KGB, after interrogating his typist Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, had found a buried copy of the book. She hanged herself soon afterward. The author quickly approved the immediate publication of his 300,000-word indictment of the communist system.
This is the most serious stuff of history, epoch-changing events on which the wheel actually turned. What happened with a romance novel at Random House this summer isn't going to change any epochs — but it may tell us something about how much our times have already changed.
As the Wall Street Journal reported, author Sherry Jones also "toiled," writing weekends since 2002 to tell a "tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem" through a fictionalized story of Aisha, Muhammad's 9-year-old bride. All was well enough until Random House sent out galleys of the book to seek endorsements from writers and scholars. Among them was Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the Journal, Spellberg read the novel and became "frantic," explaining, "You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft-core pornography."
You can't? Says who in our free-speech world?
Says Islam in our formerly free-speech world. (That's what I mean about how much our times have changed.) Whether Spellberg is herself a Muslim isn't clear, but she certainly went on the warpath (jihadpath?) over this bodice-ripper (burqa-ripper?), activating a chain of Muslim bloggers and Web sites that spread the word, as one Islamic Web site put it, about a "new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam." Soon, there was a "seven-point strategy" online to ensure "the writer withdraws this book" and apologizes to "Muslims across the world."
But that turned out to be unnecessary. Spellberg also e-mailed her editor at Random House — did I mention Spellberg has a contract with another Random House imprint to write a book called "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an"? — labeling the Jones novel nothing less than "a declaration of war," "a national security issue," and "far more controversial" than either "The Satanic Verses" or the Danish cartoons. She said the book should be withdrawn "ASAP."
And so it was after Random House consulted "security experts and Islam scholars" — possibly the same ones who urged the U.S. government never again to use the words "Islamic" or "jihad," but I digress. Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said the company received "cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some of the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."
So, Perry, by all means, just give in to this thuggish blackmail. In fact, why not just stop publishing altogether?
It's too late to ask Solzhenitsyn for his opinion of this capitulation by our elites. But then again he already offered it long ago.
"Should one point out," he asked, "that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end"?
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
| BUY DIANA'S JUST RELEASED BOOK ... |
|  at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.) by clicking HERE. |
|
JWR contributor is a columnist for The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
Archives
© 2008, Diana West
|
