Rhymes With Right

March 30, 2006

Borders & Waldenbooks -- Fear Leads To Self-Censorship

The Muhammad Cartoon Controversey has led one company to refuse to sell a magazine at its stores -- two of America's largest retailers of books and magazines.

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.
"For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority," Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.
The magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism in suburban Amherst, includes four of the drawings that originally appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, including one depicting Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse.
Islamic tradition bars depiction of Muhammad to prevent idol worship, which is strictly prohibited.

The spokesman for the chain couches the decision -- taken before the magazine even arrived in the stores, in terms of corporate choice -- but in doing so deny any number of Americans the choice to read the magazine.

Bingham said the decision was made before the magazine arrived at the company's stores. Borders Group, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., operates more than 475 Borders and 650 Waldenbooks stores in the United States, though not all regularly carry the magazine.
"We absolutely respect our customers' right to choose what they wish to read and buy and we support the First Amendment," Bingham said. "And we absolutely support the rights of Free Inquiry to publish the cartoons. We've just chosen not to carry this particular issue in our stores."

This isn't the first act of dhimmitude by borders that I have encountered recently. They've been tracking a different aspect of knuckling under to Muslim sentiment in other areas as well, according to the guys over at Colossus of Rhodey. They have discovered that there seems to be a practice at Borders of shelving the Koran out of order in the religious books section, so that it is placed above the scriptures of all other faiths. This is done lest Muslims be offended that their book is being placed in a subordinate position to any other book. The responses they got from the company avoid answering the question of whether or not this is a policy in the chain -- to paraphrase, the response was sort of "well, its what the stores all do, but I don't think its written policy -- and we'll make sure that any store that has them shelved differently gets those Korans back on the top shelf where they belong."

I think that the spokesman for Free Inquiry says it well.

"What is at stake is the precious right of freedom of expression," said Paul Kurtz, editor-in-chief of Free Inquiry. "Cartoons often provide an important form of political satire ... To refuse to distribute a publication because of fear of vigilante violence is to undermine freedom of press _ so vital for our democracy."

From where I stand, I think the stores should carry the magazine. If the concern is that Islamofascists are going to cause trouble, Muslims should be banned from the stores. After all, they are the source of the threat, not the cartoons.

And I wonder -- how will the chains mark Banned Book Week in the future -- or will they?