Appeasing Radical Islam

A post up at Little Green Footballs shows what's really behind the cowardly policy of Borders Books and Waldenbooks refusal to carry a magazine with reprints of the Jyllands-Posten's cartoons of Mohammed on the cover. Charles Johnson concludes,

This has nothing to do with sensitivity; it’s all about pure, simple fear. If a Christian group complained to Borders about Bibles being placed on a bottom shelf, they would be laughed out of the room. But when Muslims do the same thing, Borders institutes a store-wide policy. The difference? The implicit or explicit threats of violence that accompany the latter.

In a guest appearance at Michelle Malkin's blog, Allahpundit follows up on the controversy with a report about a panel discussion of the Objectivist's Club at NYU held last evening. He writes,

On a night when many trenchant points were made, the most trenchant belonged to Peter Schwartz of the Ayn Rand Institute, who noted that the goal of Islamists isn't merely to intimidate the west into censoring itself. It's to have the west accept self-censorship by dressing up its fear as something principled, such as "tolerance" or "respect for religion."

Another blogger who attended the event takes NYU administrators to task for not allowing the cartoons to be shown during the discussion.

NYU’s shameful actions violate both the moral principle of freedom of speech and, as UCLA Professor of Law Eugene Volokh recently noted, its own policies. FIRE has archived the relevant policies, in which NYU shockingly claims to be “committed to maintaining an environment where open, vigorous debate and speech can occur.” But NYU’s actions last night show that its real commitment is to censorship.