On Cowardice

Anyone who cares about freedom of speech was likely as disgusted as I was to see this now viral video of the UK’s Sky News desperately trying to avoid showing the cover of Charlie Hebdo’s latest issue featuring a picture of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Sky News is not alone in unilaterally volunteering to enforce Islamic blasphemy law on itself in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders. Major news organizations, including CNN, NBC, and the New York Times, have all agreed to censor pictures of the allegedly “offensive” cartoons at the center of this major international news story.

The decision to hide such newsworthy images from the public is nothing short of mystifying. After all, as CNN head Jeff Zucker explained at an editorial meeting on January 8th, “Journalistically, every bone says we want to use and should use [the cartoons].” So why have so many organizations made the decision to censor these cartoons? Simple. The Western media now lives in constant fear of having its employees murdered in response to any perceived slight toward Islam or its prophet. Just ask Zucker, who went on to explain that his network would not run pictures of the cartoons because “protecting and taking care of the safety of [CNN’s] employees around the world is more important right now.”

Why Plagiarism Matters

No doubt many of you out there are now aware of the furor which has erupted around Sam Harris after his encounter with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s show. The ensuing outrage has generally been directed toward Harris & Maher’s statistically verified claims about the religious roots of wildly illiberal beliefs held by vast numbers of Muslims.

There have been numerous efforts to rebut the more ridiculous mischaracterizations of Harris’ words, and Harris himself wrote what is probably the best rebuttal to the attacks against him in a blog post titled “On the Mechanics of Defamation”. Instead of belaboring those points, I want to focus on one of the weirder subplots which has been unfolding in the midst of this nonsense; namely the saga surrounding Harris critic and Salon/Alternet columnist CJ Werleman’s exposure as a serial plagiarist.