Danish cartoons- Australian media kowtow to Muslim threats

Martin Lehmann - 14 February 2006

Thousands of chanting Muslim zealots brandishing banners threatening murder and beheading of Westerners, embassies in flames, the murder of a priest and at least 13 other deaths make the Danish cartoons the month's biggest international news story. The cartoons are central to the story. Readers are entitled to see them.

Yet the gutless mainstream Australian media, with the exception of the Brisbane Courier Mail, refuse to publish them. 

Listen to the weasel words from The Sydney Morning Herald's editorial:

Editors make decisions to censor the news every day. To exclude material that is offensive, distressing, biased or just too dull is not necessarily an affront to freedom of speech. It is a very fine line to tread and no part is finer, perhaps, than the knife-edge between satire and insult. 

Never mind that the Herald's left-wing hacks insult Prime Minister Howard and President George Bush almost on a daily basis. Many people find these insults offensive.

The Herald will not publish the controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. We know it is offensive to Muslims to portray the prophet Muhammad in any way, let alone as a damning terrorist stereotype. 

Freedom of speech should be reinforced and promoted, but there are far finer causes to uphold than the right to lampoon Islam. Nor is freedom of speech without proper limits: it is not a licence to incite hatred or violence. 

What hypocrisy. The vicious attacks on Pauline Hanson by the left-wing hacks in the Herald and other media incited violence on an unprecedented scale in Australia. Ordinary citizens exercising their democratic rights to attend Hanson meetings were threatened and bashed by screaming mobs whipped into a frenzy by the Herald and others.

The Australian's editorial of February 7 bleats:

There is certainly a case for taking a low-key approach in the case of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed..... To have published the cartoons in themselves may not have offended all that many Australian Muslims. But some certainly would have been deeply affronted, and  for no purpose.

What a load of sanctimonious codswallop. They show no such respect to the Prime Minister of Australia or the President of the US. The Australian's left-wing cartoonist, Bill Leak has drawn  some of the most scurrilous anti-Howard and anti-Bush cartoons imaginable.  One of Leak's most outrageous cartoons depicted John Howard and Phillip Ruddock in Nazi uniforms flinging children overboard from a refugee boat. That cartoon offended many Australians, yet the Australian ran it.

And in a monumental act of hypocrisy the Australian on February 11 published (p24), Piss Christ, the notorious 1989 photograph of Christ on a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine, a piece of so-called art that is deeply offensive to Christians.

The same media had no qualms about ripping the guts out of a legitimate Australian political party or insulting  the one million Australians who voted for that party by implying they were redneck retards. Yet here they are cowering in fear from threats of violence from rampaging Muslims fascists.

This unsavoury episode exposes the mainstream journalists for what they are - a bunch of left-wing politically correct bigots bent on pushing their multicultural agenda at all costs. 

See also:

The political assassination of Pauline Hanson

Australian media a threat to democracy