Today has been an orgy of self-righteousness and pusillanimity. Tomorrow will be no different. To be sure, there is no shortage of those who claim to “be Charlie” and “stand with Charlie,” but there has long been a shortage—in France, I fear, a fatal one—of those who are prepared to do anything more than affect to support the cause of freedom. As for the rest of Europe, now we will learn what is left of its soul.
For my part, I can do no more than reprint the cartoons that appear below, which were originally printed on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. The New York Daily News and the Daily Telegraph declined to do as much. When they ran photographs of the magazine in their online news coverage, they pixelated the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad for which the staff of Charlie Hebdo was exterminated. In addition, the Associated Press is refusing to distribute images that contain such caricatures. Would that it didn’t need to be said, but it does: a newspaper that doesn’t believe in freedom of speech believes in nothing—not even itself.
May these acts of cowardice be forever remembered in the annals of journalism.
UPDATE: I am proud to report that the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is reprinting the above cartoon in Thursday’s editions.
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post (the news side, not the editorial page) have decided not to reprint or telecast images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that led to the attack.
